I've successfully installed two flavours of Ubuntu on virtual machines and via the Wubi installer, and I haven't been disappointed so far. I've learned a lot about Linux, xorg.conf, and the difficulty of getting Linux OSes to see and properly utilise their hardware.

I've determined that Xubuntu might be a bit heavy for my 256M memory PII processor 5GB hard disk space machine (Kurdnatta); it seems to run slower and slower every time I use it. I only wish the system requirements on the Xubuntu site had been written in such a way that I would have not thought this distribution was suitable for my machine. To me, if the recommended is 384Mb memory and I have 256, I think I'm good to go. No mention was made of processor speeds or HD space.

I'm currently experimenting with a few lightweight Ubuntu-based distributions such as CrunchBang and Fluxbuntu.  Through research on the Ubuntu forums, I've determined it might be possible to install a lightweight, custom install of Ubuntu on my old laptop, Parnaparnti.  A Fluxbox install is currently running in VirtualBox on my primary machine.  We'll see how that turns out.