Xirkander

If you speak Japanese, you might want to contact the embassy and offer your help as a translator. Once the US army gets involved they might want to have translators with the teams, since I don't think most US soldiers speak a word of Japanese. (If the embassy ignores you, call the US base(s) directly.)

One thing though: If they take you up on it, make sure you are insured. You never know if something happens while you are in the disaster zone.

I have an old Latitude C840 that I want to use as a net book type of computer. It's only got 512 MB ram.

What is the best distro to use? I'll use it to browse the internet and maybe type some stuff on.

Also, is there a lightweight text processing program you can advice. I think open office will be a bit to heavy for it, or am i wrong?

I live at the Henault - East Flanders border. I'm not impacted (yet), but I have a feeling a lot of people near me are. Some friends have water in their basement. The river near me was really high this afternoon, some neighboring gardens were starting to get flooded.

Edit: Doesn't seem as bad as I thought. Can stop building my ark.