Best starting distro other than Ubuntu
 

Hello I am extremely new to Linux and would very much like to learn how to use it. I tried using Ubuntu but had a ton of trouble configuring the wireless network card so I uninstalled it. I am looking for a distro to dual boot with windows. Which of these would be the best for a Linux newb to get the internet working?

openSUSE
PCLinuxOS
Linux Mint
Fedora

Thank You very much.

or any other distro for that matter.

I was impressed with how easily PCLinuxOS installed on my laptop--wireless worked "out of the box".

Its not so much the distro that you need to concern with, since those you listed are all decent ones to use. Rather its the desktop environment you install that will determine whether its easier or harder to configure network/wireless connections.

From personal experience with the two major environments, I have found that KDE has the easiest to locate tools for setting up a network connection. In GNOME you have to hunt a little bit more for similar tools.

After a bit of getting used to it you could find the GNOME tools as easily as you would in KDE.

That's the first thing that I loved about PCLinuxOS as well. My notebook computer's wireless NIC worked without any trouble. Then the way that PCLinuxOS has all of the multimedia codecs made me a groupie. I had been using OpenSuSE for years and you know how they hate multimedia.

How about Sabayon? I had that recommended to me on another forum.

Oh I forgot on Ubuntu I wasn't able to use a wired connection either, same with Knoppix.

In which case you are probably going to have trouble. Knoppix has always been my benchmark for hardware detection.
Likewise the reason I tried Ubuntu initially was because when I was at a Linux convention one of the devs challenged anyone to find a wifi card that didn't work/configure better on Ubuntu than any other distro.
He was pretty confident of his work, so I tried it with an old Cisco 350 card I had - came straight up (all this was a couple of years back).

Sounds like you might have a hard time unless you can suss out the network hardware.

Do you know how I could do this?

Is it me or is this too difficult?
 

Ok after doing some research I am ready to install Linux, however I have tried KNOPPIX and Ubuntu before and could not connect to my wired network. Is my computer just wrong for Linux or should I try a different distro? I don't have Linux installed so I can't answer any questions about what the terminal says.

I am guessing that your Ethernet device is not supported by your kernel. Find the device information for your Ethernet device, then we can offer more assistance, and hopefully get this issue resolved.

So how do I do this? I'm confused to what you are asking me to do?

Try

What kind of Ethernet card do you have? In Linux, you can run the lspci command from the terminal and look in the output for your Ethernet card. Post that info here. Most Ethernet cards work well with Linux, but some (Marvell, I've noticed) have problems.

I don't currently have Linux installed but I'm pretty sure that I have a Broadcom Ethernet card.