I'm pretty computer savvy (advanced CS student) but still a bit of a Linux newb. I've been running Debian on an older box of mine for a little while just to mess around with it, but I'm doing some work with robotics and I want to put a Linux partition on my main PC. However, I have some fairly modern hardware in this particular box and I'm wondering if anyone could suggest a distro that they think would support my specs without a huge amount of extra work on my part. My initial instinct was to stick with Debian, but I know it can get out of date from time to time. I'm considering switching to Fedora, or to the most recent and unstable version of Debian. Can anyone nudge me towards a distro choice that would be optimal? Its a P4 3.2ghz machine and I'm mainly anxious about support for my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (256mb) and my SB Audigy 2. Thanks!

Gentoo would be a good fit for an advanced CS student with that kind of hardware. It's not the easiest distro to install but it's pretty smooth considering you build everything from source. Do a stage 1 install and follow the installation handbook and you'll have a pretty good time if you're a geek (advanced CS students usually are ).


Håkan