Not a bad little laptop for the price you seem to have payed and a nice resolution to boot (congrats- finding a laptop with a good res has not been the easiest since they dropped in resolution around the end of the P4 era)- do remember to pull it apart and check the fans and maybe keep that extra 100 for either some more RAM (although 2 gigs is enough until you go silly CAD/video stuff or proper virtual machines) or a new hard drive.
Best linux distro for what you want- pretty much any that are not specialist or cut down (puppy linux and such) although realistically you could probably get things done there as well; python, dev grade text editors and firefox are not exactly exotic packages. I could go further but it would probably be a list of the first five from
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
I can't say I have done much with Fedora of late and I have never really gone in for ubuntu (why would I when mint exists) but I have the others running various types of computers I have to be able to rely upon and I have no problems with them at all. For a machine of that vintage the worst case scenario is probably you get familar with ndis or just buy a nice wireless cart (decent atheros things are not a lot at all and can do N speeds)