I have an Emachines T2885. It has a Pentium Centrino processor. I have an aftermarket HP Motherboard with 768 mb of RAM. I have a 120gb hard drive. I also have an Nvidia Graphics card. It is an Nvidia Geforce4 MX. I have tried installing Ubuntu, Mandriva, Linux Mint, and Opensuse. I am currently running opensuse but am not pleased with it. I have only been using linux for a couple weeks. I need a distrobution that will detect and allow me to use my nvidia card. Ubuntu and Opensuse made me use onboard video. I also need it to have sound. Basically I need a newbie linux with great Hardware and sound configuration. I need it to be easy, but not easy as where i will not learn anything. Sorry if this seems confusing. I would also hope that the linux looks nice, and has desktop effects. I do not care whether it is Gnome or KDE as i dont yet have a preference. I need a distro with a great community as to help me with bugs and problems. It also needs to be able to install lots of software easily.

BTW: Ubuntu and Linux Mint installer and boot would freeze when i would try to use PCI graphics card.

Thanks so much!

Go to OpenSuse.org and type in Nvidia card. There is a download that will load it. I know because I used it 2 weeks ago when I loaded opensuse and it was not recognizing my Nvidia card now it looks great like it's suppose to. Good Luck

Ubuntu is a great distro and I would highly recommend it. It's user friendly, and Debian based.

It is very easy to get your card working in Ubuntu. You need to open the synaptic package manager, then enable the restricted repositories. This repository contains 3rd party drivers from nvidia among other things. Then you need to install the package nvidia-glx-96.

This package has an info page here.

Once you install the correct driver you shouldn't have any problems.

Note that Linux Mint is Ubuntu based, so this same solution will work with Linux Mint as well.