I downloaded SUSE 10.1 on the recommendation from a friend using it on a laptop who I told that I wouldn't use Linux unless it worked on my mobile, and desk machines. I DL'd the 5 CD's and INSTALLATION went as expected flawlessly on my Gateway P-4 running at 2.3Ghz with lots of resources.

It went downhill from there... First off, system sounds were not enabled dspite trying to configure the internal sound, or my USB sound card.

The next thing I tried to do is play some tunes from a memory stick and the player wouldn't play .mp3 files, wanted to continually re-configure itself but, finally wouldn't play a tune.

Next up was wireless. Neither the internal 802.11G or external 802.11B worked. Both were shown in the device list.

I do not know what else doesn't work. Is there a distro that works nearly as well as Scumsoft's XP on laptops?

Regards,

Gary

Please read;

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Ask_a_Question

Then post again.

And since this is a general "which distro" question, I have moved it to the Linux-Distributions forum. And yep, definitely read that guide. That Lenard is wise beyond his years for suggesting it

If you want a distro that detects hardware and sets itself up, it's PCLinuxOS. The only problems being that if your wireless is "ipw2200" it is broken in the current version (0.93a) to the point that it only works without WEP (but is detected automatically otherwise). It will be fixed in 0.94 and does work if you get hold of the old 0.92 version. If your screen is Widescreen, you may have to download certain drivers to use the desired resolution, it will initially come up as 1024x768 so you would be able to use it until you did so.

The PCLinuxOS Control Centre is pretty clever at sorting out Ndiswrapper where appropriate, this is a program which enables SOME wireless cards, not supported in Linux, to be run off Windows drivers.

I always suggest installable LiveCD distros because you can see if it gets your hardware working before committing your disc space.

I'd reccomend A couple

Kubuntu
http://www.kubuntu.org/

Mandriva
http://frontal2.mandriva.com/en/downloads/mirrors


PCLinuxOS .92
http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/dist...glish/preview/
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distr...glish/preview/

This is the distro I use and recommend, Why because it works right out of the box. No need to configure Everything, everything just works. It also comes as a 1 CD install that is a live CD that you can install later if you wish.

BeatrIX
http://www.watsky.net/download.html

Blag
http://www.blagblagblag.org/download/

Mephis
http://www.mepis.org/

feather Linux
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

Vector Linux 4.3
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

BeatrIX
http://www.watsky.net/