I know that everyone has their favorite distro - I do too. I need some specifically targeted advice.

I'm trying to get my mother to switch over to linux. I need a good desktop distro.

The EXACT requirements are as follows:

1) She already uses OpenOffice, Thunderbird, and FireFox (and not much more) so program compadibility isn't an issue.

2) It should be relatively easy-to-use and non-technical. KDE is a must. An automatic login would be a plus (as in KDM).

3) *** I am a technical person, and administer Linux servers both at work and as a hobby. I'm not looking for "Lindoze". I want something that, while it is user-friendly at the GUI terminal, I can SSH into from work, or while away, to "fix" whatever is wrong.

4) A setup utility like SuSE's YAST (which provides simple menu-based administration via telnet or SSH) is a plus, as I could walk her through basic troubleshooting if the network is down.

5) It should be relatively difficult to break - i.e. all settings which the user doesn't NEED to have access to should be locked for root only.

6) Needs to have good support for Flash, video, multimedia - what you would expect out of a modern internet browsing machine.

That is what I require. Two nice bonuses:

1) If I could get or make a Live CD/DVD with OpenOffice and Firefox for her to try out before commiting, that would be nice.

2) Something that's compadible with syslog-ng would be nice, as I need solid local logging, and also sending logs to my logging server would be nice.

You don't want to put her on suse? Try kubuntu. I think you make like it, and the install disk comes as a livecd.

Try PCLinuxOS,

http://www.pclinuxos.com/page.php?7

also try the Linux Distro Chooser to find your Mothers perfect choice of Distro:

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

Hope this Helps,

Jake

Thanks for the info.

I've heard some not-so-good things about PCLinux, so I think I'm going to stay away from it.

I burned Live CD/DVD's of Mandriva, Kubuntu, and SuSE, and I also have a Ubunutu LiveCD.

I'm going to have her look over all of them, and see what happens.

I also made a set for my girlfriend, but she probably won't have a problem with SuSE, as long as the multimedia features work well and it stays relatively stable.

Stability shouldn't be a problem with SUSE.

I know that was poorly phrased, I was quite rushed.

I need it to be idiot-proof. Granted, yes, locking down user privilages should do most of that. And I've had great luck with uptime on SuSE. However, the user will have the knowledge to open Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice. That's about it, and anything past that will require me to SSH in.

Also, at the moment, the machine is connected using a Belkin USB wireless networking card, which seems to be unsupported.

ndiswrapper should take care of your USB card not working.