distro for video ediiting, vmware, nvidia, sata
 

I have tried so many distros my head is now spinning. I know you can pretty much adjust any distro for your stylings, but some are easier than others. I like Ubuntu alot, but I don't like the way it handles users and I was never able to get it to read/write my NTFS sata drive. Here's my problem, I may have tried a great distro, but I'm not sure I'm getting from it all it has to offer because of my inexperience. For instance, I really liked Puppy. It was fast, recognized my satat, and intuitive ... except didn't seem to have many apps available for install. Appears you have to change .debs to pups and might break your system. See, I could be totally wrong about it's limitations, but that was my experience. So, I'm hoping someone out there has my same needs and has found a distro that works for them. Just to give me hope. I want to eliminate my Windows altogether.

Here are my needs:
Speed. I hate lag.
Plenty of programs to install and play with
Read/write access to my Sata drive
Ability to get nvidia card drivers
Abibility to get what I need to play, edit, and burn dvd videos
Ability to run vmware or win4lin (not just wine or cedega) to get Sims 2 and Star Wars Empire at War running. I was able to get Sims 2 running in Ubuntu with win4lin.
Ability to sync to my ipaq (probably another vmware function there)

I don't mind some command line stuff and some installs/configurations if there's good forums out there :-) But primarily I want it to just work

Jen

My ArchLinux based laptop does everything you mentioned on the list. I've recompiled every package to get maximum juice from Core2 Duo processor.

Regards and good luck.

Its all about what you install as most distros don't come with support for proprietary stuff right out of the box.

You can't access your SATA drive because its NTFS and you don't have NTFS support installed. Check out ntfs3g
Your speed issues are probably related to the lack of a proper video driver or outdated hardware. For Fedora I use kmod nvidia. You can download a driver right from nvidia but I thought those were annoying to install as you had to have a specific kernel. You haven't enabled beryl or anything have you? :p

As for the other things, they're available so long as you install them. Search the repos or google.

Theres actually a new ubuntu distro coming out this month called ubuntu studio which is supposed to be geared towards multimedia purposes. I think I'll be checking it out.
http://ubuntustudio.org/

Hi jdriller,
i'll still say ubuntu. It have big repository, easy to use, acceptable performance, good online support and it able to read/write ntfs partition too.

And my laptop is using sata hard disk too(sda1 is ntfs partition).

For your information my laptop able to use this:-
vmware server/player
ms office 2003 viewer
Acrobat Reader 7
Jdk1.5
warcraft3
nvidia
mainactor for video editing
Macromedia flash player (under wine, it better than mozilla-plugin)
some open source network auditing tools like nessus, ettercap, ethereal, etherape, nmap
picasa
googleearth
and so many others thing.

Before reformat computer, I was run MsOffice 2003 and Macromedia Flash/Dreamweaver 8 in my laptop too.

In my experience, in Linux you should not always reformat your PC. Because building Linux desktop like building a house, patient and steady in order to make a big, stable, userfriendly and beautiful house.

Regards,
Ks