In need of an ideal setup

I've been learning a lot of the basics of programming for the past few months. I want to start to get a lot more into it, and I want to look into getting a laptop just for the purpose of wordprocessing for school and programming in basic,java, and c. Since this is all I'm going to be using it for, I don't need a great machine. I want something very cheap and as small as possible. Also, I hear that making windows applications is a lot harder than a lot of other os, so an alternate os that is well suited for programming would be grat as well. Thanks in advance
     -not you                

Word processing...: Vim, latexsuite (or is it vim-latex) and LaTeX.
Basic: No, drop the course or kill yourself or the teachers.
Java: Same, or try switching to C#, use Vim and Mono in that case.
C: Vim and GCC.

Run Vim on Zsh, which in turn runs on GNU Screen, and whatever getty you want. The Linux kernel is fine, as long as it is no older than two weeks old. The rest doesn't matter, but Gentoo will do fine as it is easy to use.

As for the hardware, a laptop, eh? Sure, just get one with a nice screen and a comfortable keyboard. Don't put anything more than a SSH client on the Laptop, keep your work on a server somewhere and SSH there to work.

This post was brought to you by Anonymous, Computer Master God Desu.