Today I bought a Compaq box with 3 gb ram, a 250 mb hard drive and a emachines lcd display. The box comes loaded with Vesta and works. At the moment I am booted off a CDROM image of Open Solaris (SunOS 5.11) from the DVD drive and running several cliants, xterms, xman, and two copies of the the file manager entirely in memory with no appearent strain to the machine.
There is no emacs, only vi, so I have to remember enough of that to get this in. I put in one of my USB sticks, which have a FAT filesystem in them. This system saw them right away and opened a file manager. Now, I am going to see if I can save this file and copy it to the stick as any work I do with this system would be volitile.
The only problem I can see if that this live CD didn't try to configure my network even though Windows had it correctly configured. It didn't try to diagnose what is out in the ether. Maybe this is a security feature. It would be nice if it could.