[intergalplan]

Gentoo on an IBM Thinkpad (IIRC a 900Mhz Celeron + 384MB memory) was my laptop in college. Aside from a few beasts (KDE or Gnome, for which you'd end up needing to have at least the libs to run much in X even if you didn't use those DEs, OpenOffice [holy crap, maybe the single longest compile?] and to a lesser extent Firefox) the compiling wasn't really that bad.

Only non-Apple laptop I've had where suspend-to-disk worked every time. I don't know exactly what the deal was, but the IBM firmware had some feature that took care of it for you if you added a correctly-typed, sufficiently-large partition at the right spot on the disk. It just worked.