I have SuSE, Red Hat 9, Fedora Core Release 1, Mandrake 10, Ark, and I have tried to upgrade my Fedora Release to Release 2, and I was really disappointed by the way it handled. I got errors after installing it, then when the interface came up non of it worked, it looks pretty nice, I just don't know what I am doing wrong. I have tried Mandrake as well and I cannot configure my Creative Audigy Sound card, which I paid good money for, so I just gave up and went back to Windows. Its funny that with Fedora Core's Kernel 2.4.22-1.2197.nptl everything works, and I didn't need to burn ISO's, I just upgraded from RH9 with Apt-get. But with the new Kernel I have problems with everything. And I though that Kernel 2.6 is supposed to be better the 2.4. So I didn't bother burning FC2 ISOs since it still in testing phase. And I would like to try Free BSD any good mirrors in Canada?

Why not give Slackware a chance?

It is different from most of other distros.

Your sound card will probably be ok under slackware.

The problem may be that you have to manually configure the system. But if you like it in this way, you will find a very clean system, ;-)

Keep It Simple and Small.

Yeah, yeah, i would have used Slackware if it support Unicode out of the box. It can't seem to display Vietnamese character (UTF-8 or UTF-16).
Your sound card should work well on FC2, why don't you do a fresh install of FC2?? It could solve a lot of problems.
FreeBSD is the best!! (my own opinion only), the only problem is you have to configure everything manually. Beware that FreeBSD doesn't come with sound support out of the box, you have to reconfigure to make your sound card work, for me, I add snd_pcm_load="YES" and snd_csa_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf just to make my sound card work . You could visit freebsd.org to find mirrors in Canada.

i used to use freebsd, but had major headaches trying to get rpm's or binaries to work, had to compile everything, but it ran fast as hell I am not sure mandrake supports utf-8/16 out of the box, i tried to get a "wide" charater to work using perl, and it put up ascii barf

You can not use RPM in FreeBSD (most). However, you don't need to compile everything, you can go to freebsd.org to download the pre-compiled package, just remember to download the one which match your FreeBSD version. And yes, FreeBSD is just soooooo fast!!! I'm able to get X up and running in less than 20sec. Maybe it's because they don't try to cram as much programs as possible in an OS (most of it I don't even need) like Linux does.

I don't know about Mandrake but RedHat do support Unicode out of the box. Anyway, at least I can still view Unicode web page in Mandrake (but not in Slackware).

yep, but i had problems getting my sound card and my wifi to work in freebsd, grrr it did run fast, i need to recompile my kernel, but got buttloads of strange errors when i tried, oh well, will try again

I'm not sure about wifi as my old laptop doesn't support wifi so I haven't got a chance to try for myself but your sound card, view the handbook in freebsd.org website, it should give you a lot of idea. I only need to add snd_pcm_load="YES" and snd_csa_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf and then reboot to make my sound card work. For you, I think you need to add snd_pcm_load="YES" to your /boot/loader.conf and also snd_xxx_load="YES" where xxx is depend on your sound card. Reboot and everything should work fine.

my laptop is old, and i use wifi every time i boot up, as long as you have a pcmcia (cardbus) slot you might just be able to do wifi, as to sound, i have a pain in the butt crystal labs soundcard, and it's built into a laptop, so i can't even remove it and put in a very functional soundblaster 16 that everyone in the world supports. Ah well, i got it all working under mandrake, but speed could be faster

Grrr, I'm too poor I coudn't even buy a wifi PCMCIA card for my old laptop. Anyway, since you have a crystal labs soundcard, you could add snd_pcm_load="YES" & snd_csa_load="YES" to your /boot/loader.conf and your sound card should work fine. I have a crystal labs soundcard and it work for me. Even if you have a soundblaster 16 sound card you wouldn't be able to make it work under FreeBSD without adding something into /boot/loader.conf.

Good luck configuring FreeBSD!

ok thanx. i'll keep that in mind if i switch back to freebsd