A specific distro probably won't help you, but newer is better as there have been good advances in the kernels lately with ACPI support and other things.
*They should all have PCMCIA support, what they may NOT have is support for whatever you're plugging in to the slot. Those are two different things. The most important thing would probably be hotplug support, and probably all of the distros that you listed have that.
*WPA WLAN support. This doesn't depend on your distro, this depends on which WLAN card you have. Some are supported WPA, many are not. There are quite a few WLAN cards supported in the ndiswrapper project by using the native windows drivers, however, WPA is known to crash computers on quite a few of those supported cards. I'd need more information about your type of card before know how well it is supported. A debian based distro will most likely have more up to date ndiswrapper packages than an rpm based distro. Some debian-based distros: Mepis, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.
*They'll probably all have a decent display for your card. However, you probably won't have good 3D support for your card without installing the ATI drivers, which is a headache according to most people.
*Decent support for your touchpad is going to require for you to install Synaptic (not Synaptics). This will give you control over your pad and let you configure whether you want to have a scrolling area and how big the scrolling area will be, etc.
|