Some more Linux information -

Thanks to Chris, today I saw Ubuntu run perfectly on an IBM Thinkpad. This distribution seems very complete and is easy to install on a laptop. It has great driver support. Here is a good site to help with Ubuntu, Ubuntu 5.04 Starter Guide.
From Christiaan, of Home Networking Help, SuSE has a live CD version that runs purely in RAM. It is a pretty full featured and can be used to install a small partition too on the system for perm files but still run off the CD.