Hi Mr.Trovalds:
As Toaster said a P200 is rather ideal for a Linux box, because (a) its hardware will pretty much be to Linux' liking and (b) It will counter the frustrations laid upon by today's modern day superbloatware.
RedHat 6.2 would be my distrib of choice. If you have to buy Linux, and there are no discount CD's available in S'pore, I'd suggest waiting for kernel 2.4.xx
Among other things the new kernel will have native support for 7th generation processors [Athlon, Duron etc], alongwith instruction support for 3D-Now and a variety of others that have crept up with newer processors.
www.linuxdoc.org is a fairly well organized repository of documentation. For apps goto
www.freshmeat.net .. for absolute bleeding edge [some of them are in pre-alpha etc.] check out
www.sourceforge.net
Other than, if you wanted to guage the popularity of Linux documentation do a google search for any topic that is remotely connected to Linux and you will get pages of hits. Be warned though, read the date of documentation if any before you begin; not so much cos of incompatibilities but cos newer releases of Linux will probably have all that u are looking for natively.
& I cant stress enough, if you are a newuser, make sure you install ALL documentation related to the packages u put in, then take the time and go through them.
Good luck.