New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
If SliTaz was abandoned, they must have built a great set of bots to carry on the legacy, because commits are being made to their repos and nightlies are being built.
Crunchbang was on my list of distros to include, but, if I recall correctly, I decided to go with Bodhi instead because it has a unique desktop that deserves mention in lightweight Linux desktop discussions, and because its download was only 700MB to Bunsenlab's 1.1GB download.
Getting the list down to 5 (an arbitrary number, admittedly, but attention spans are only so long) was tough! Sacrifices had to be made, and Bunsenlabs was one of them.
Any of the distributions on this list probably will, and probably several others will too. Without knowing the specs of your laptop, it's hard to say where you should start. You might try http://linuxquestions.org to talk to some Linux users, tell them what you're looking for (do you just want an OS to make your Transformer work, or are you looking specifically to learn Linux as a desktop, or as a programming environment?), and see what they recommend.
Good luck!