When was this? I used VectorLinux on a 600MHz celeron with 64MB RAM for a year at uni, and I could tell you what every process was doing there - everything else had to go.
Well, okay, puppylinux was pretty good if I recall in that respect. This was ~15ish years ago, and I think that debian and slackware were bloated in comparison to XP back then
Yeah VL was based off slack but they ripped a bunch of things out, and I carefully went over the bootscripts and removed a bit more of things I didn't definitely need.
I don't really blog, and I've forgotten all the juicy details at this point. It was an old thinkpad that just barely booted up windows ME and then couldn't do anything useful. VectorLinux was a really great match for it, I think they claimed to have fiddled with the kde libraries at the source level and ripped out a bunch of things to make it all snappier - I don't know to what extent that's true, but that crappy little laptop allowed me to run firefox, openoffice, skype, matlab and latex (not all at the same time - at most two) for my first year of uni.
Hearing about these esoteric Linux distros and their lore is always interesting.
I'm surprised Skype used to be functional, post Microsoft acquisition I remember constantly fiddling with it to run consistently on fairly recent versions of Ubuntu on a 4th gen i5 latitude.
oh it was a pain in the gluteus maximus, this was before alsa worked properly, so it was using oss, and you could only have one application using the sound card. this means a random flash applet at the bottom of a page on Firefox could easily hold it and Skype would just not work.
