I tried Debian, and it felt so similar to Ubuntu (since Ubuntu is based on Debian) that I decided to give Ubuntu another shot. Well, actually Xubuntu, since I've heard that Xcfe is faster than Gnome. Xubuntu's Task Manager says that it uses up 12% of my RAM on a fresh boot, since the machine has 1GB I guess that's just about 120MB.

I didn't know what sort of resource monitor Debian had, so I didn't check.

But if #! can run on under 60MB, it's definitely worth a shot. I guess I'll start playing around with some more distros. I've also downloaded PCLinuxOS.

[EDIT]Hmm... #! is currently using 93.7 out of 1,000 MiB RAM when running from the Live CD (USB, actually). Not sure if that's a good enough advantage over Xubuntu. Maybe it would have a smaller memory footprint running off the HDD rather than the Live USB?[/EDIT]

[EDIT2] And #! won't install. It can't access the security.debian.com repository and it won't install GRUB boot loader. I find that strange because Debian and Ubuntu both install the boot loader just fine. In fact, GRUB is already the main boot loader for this netbook, so it's already installed. So much for #!... [/EDIT2]

I really like the idea of running Tiny/MicroCore Linux from RAMDisk, but sadly I don't know enough about Linux to do anything with that particular distro.

Very sorry to hear your difficulty in getting this thing up and running.
Believe me, I understand how frustrating Linux can sometimes be, but when it does go...  

I didn't know what sort of resource monitor Debian had, so I didn't check.

All Linux versions have a command-line utility called 'top' that gives you running stats.
'htop' is even better, but it's not installed by default on most distros.
Otherwise, each Desktop Environment will have it's own graphical reource monitor.
On Xfce, it's simply "xfce4-taskmanager" (not always installed by default).
Gnome has "System Monitor" and KDE has "KSysGuard".

Could this be because I told both of them to use the same partition for Swap?

Nope, a swap is a swap.
Nothing should be hanging out in there to muck with the other's.
What desktop version of PCLinuxOS are you trying?
KDE? Gnome? Xfce?
If it's Xfce, just hit Alt+F2 and type in: xfce4-panel
The others, I dunno.

Regarding the PCLOS repository bug:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,87377.0.html

For Xubuntu, I don't know what is causing that.
Sometimes an install just goes south when first installed.
Sometimes re-burning the install CD at a slower speed and re-installing will fix it, sometimes a second attempt at installing will spiff it up, sometimes nothing helps.
That said, I'm not even sure Xubuntu is as lightweight as some promise; it's still Ubuntu under the hood, after all.
I'd go with the Debian Xfce live disk if you want to see Xfce fly.
This might help as well:
http://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/MSI/WindU100

Looks like the Slitaz website is back up:
http://slitaz.org
I had a pleasant time with it on an older laptop a friend gave me before the power supply died; I can give it a solid recommendation.

LXDE uses OpenBox as the Window Manager, so you're already halfway there.
Most of what 'makes' LXDE is the different panel/launcher/utility thingummies bundled in.
Not exactly sure, but it sounds like your problem with OpenBox is there's no bar thingy running by default.
ObConf (OpenBox configuration manager GUI) should help get that worked out.

I actually liked LXDE's LxPanel a lot, worked better and more stable than a lot of other lightweight panels.
Incidentally, the Xfce panel plays nice with OpenBox as well.

Mint is based on Ubuntu, don't know if you'll get any performance increase but I've heard some reports that Mint solves some hardware problems that Ubuntu still has.

Okay, this is weird. I shut down my netbook to take it somewhere, and when I booted back into PCLinuxOS it had the background image and the "bar thingy" again. The weird thing is that I've rebooted multiple times before and it always had the nothingness. But now every time I boot it up and has the wallpaper and bar thingy.

And it doesn't seem to take up any more RAM to show those things.

I got a bit lazy and haven't tried any new linux distros. PCLinuxOS seems to do what I wanted for my netbook, which is mostly to use up as little resources as possible so I can use it as a Minecraft server.

Thanks for recommending it to me. I think I'm going to stick with it for a while.

PCLinuxOS guys seem to have a sense of humor as well..

[attachthumb=#]

• http://www.pclinuxos.com/