[GTALUG] distro for an old Thinkpad

Hi - I've been setting up an old Thinkpad R51 as Protolab's small CNC controller. I've been trying to use Debian 8, but it seems not to like the Radeon 250M in the machine at *all*. I'm stuck with "an error occurred / click here to log out", and no sshd to access the machine remotely. Can anyone suggest a light(ish) graphical distro that's user focussed and will allow fairly recent packaged apps like Cura and LinuxCNC to run? I realise that this Thinkpad is slower than a Raspberry Pi 3 (I benchmarked it) but it does have a parallel port that we can use with the ZenBot CNC. cheers, Stewart