2 questions
 

First off, is there a linux distro that will support my graphics card (Nvidia Quadro FX go1400 256mb)? I can only seem to run BackTrack and Knoppix, I could download every distro...but that would take forever. I Just recently installed mandriva, today in fact, which was supposedly "certified" to run on intel centrino chipsets, but my video card is not even on the list, and when everything is installed and i put in startx i get some kind of error saying hardware not found(i removed the partition so i dont know the exact error message, but im going to reinstall to see if i can get it to work). Second question, which distro works well with laptops?

My laptop specs are as follows:

Intel Centrino 1.86GHz (915 Chipset)
2GB DDR2 RAM
256MB Nvidia Quadro FX Go1400
80GB HDD
Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG

I'm about to give up on trying to get linux to run on this laptop so please please somebody help me.

the ONLY distro i had luck with was ubuntu on my laptop
went on perfect
small, installs easy, and nice.
your gfx card should work fine
may want to check nvidia site for driver updates after installing.
it seems form what i found it uses the default "nv" driver was does not provide 3d acceleration(reasons for getting nvdia) i may be wrong but that is what i went through

When you're installing if you have to pick a video card, any Nvidia card will do the same thing so just pick whatever. That will set up Xorg to use the nv driver which as old mate above said, doesn't support 3D acceleration but does accelerate 2D graphics. From there, either install the Mandriva nvidia package or the driver package from the Nvidia site and you'll get full use of your video card :)

BTW I cant install ubuntu either i dont remember what the problem was (it was about 2 months ago), i guess i can try one of the driver selections, but they are all the GeForce FX drivers not the Quadro FX drivers. I'll install it once more and post the error message i get. I did go to the nvidia page and get the drivers but the only problem with installing them is i dont know how to install anything on linux (mainly because i have not been able to install a distro that works on my laptop without some kind of problem going into the graphical interface.

As I said, pick any card from Nvidia because they all use the same Xorg driver. Then once you're up an running without any GUI problems you can go install the official Nvidia driver.

Your right, it worked now all I have to do is install the graphic drivers, hopefully there is a tutorial somewhere explaining how to install it.

Thank you very much for your help :)