Salix OS

Please forgive my ignorance. I have just received a Lenovo T400 laptop (circa 2008) with a bad hdd. I replaced the hdd but, I don't know if I should set it up with a gpt or dos partition table. Any help would be appreciated.

It depends how you want to use it, but gpt has advantages like ability to set a lot of partitions with no practical size limit. So, I'd go for gpt.

This won't prevent you to use lilo as boot manager, just write the boot record on MBR (aka /dev/sda if you have only one HDD), not on a partition.