linux - which flavour???

Im trying to breath a bit of new life into an old laptop, its a 1.8GHz 512 ram, with a wifi card, nothing fancy.

Ive been trying ubuntu with it dual boot with windows, just updated the ubuntu and broken it, the grub loder has corrupted, the same thing happened last time I tried linux, so figured, what the hell, lets just go for a single linux install.

Whichever linux I use, it needs to install from a CD, the bios has no usb boot option, so that seems to put most netbook editions out, unfortunatly.

so, to the linux users out there, any reccomendations??

Personally I use Debian, it has a wide variety of packages readily available and are also well maintained. I also much prefer the Apt updater than the Yum updater which for me is a big deal from a maintainability perspective. To me a lot of the package "standards" that Debian put in place are much more logical that other distributions and makes everything a lot more uniform.

That said I'd say it's mostly about personal taste, the best thing to do is to try out a variety of different distributions and see which one you like, saying that I'd say that Ubuntu is a fairly user friendly OS that should serve your needs fairly well. Though with the slightly limited specs it may be an idea to run a more lightweight desktop environment like XFCE rather than Gnome or KDE, which is probably what these "netbook editions" revolve around. With Debian for instance you could just use the standard netinst CD and change the default desktop environment using a boot option documented here:

http://wiki.debian.org/Xfce

You could always check out Distrowatch:
http://distrowatch.com/

Distrowatch has a lot of distributions listed in categories that may help you find a distribution for your needs:
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Old+Computers

Someone told me Linux Mint but I haven't tried it yet.

I'll let you know

Ultimate Linux 2.8

Based on Ubuntu 10.04 with more bells and whistles

Everything you ever wanted in a distro

IMHO

I've just got a copy of Ubuntu 10.10 to load onto my son's PC. When I've finished rebuilding it....