bought a xiaomi air 13, cheap, sturdy, nice screen, ok keybaord/pad, fully Linux compatible, I get 6~8 hours battery life with light surfing running Linux after some tweaking. Best price/quality ratio IMHO.
I used to use Gentoo minimal installs but recently discovered Alpine Linux (http://alpinelinux.org/) which is even better.
Use some livecCD or Alpine Linux to create your own CD, and tunnel IP in mails for the fun
22 years give or take, started with SLS, can't remember which version probably older than this one ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/hist... as I can vaguely remember kernel 0.97 but SLS 1.03 has kernel 0.98pl.
FWIW this is the first Linux distro (there are earlier versions but I didn't bother to search) ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/hist...
And the place to get your kernel was ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/
The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe. -- Chester Gould/Dick Tracy