I realize that with network manager .7, most of everyones troubles will go away, but until then, I need a distro that has figured out how to:

Make NetworkManager work with wpa-psk wireless and static IP's, along with wired static ips.

So far, fedora gets it the most right between fedora and ubuntu 6.10. In fact, Ubuntu wont work at all with my requirements. Are there any other distros that do a better job than either of the two I've tried?

Actually Kubuntu worked very well with my wireless network, although somewhat slow as I was running a live CD at the time to see if it worked

Kubuntu
http://www.kubuntu.org/

Mandriva & SUSE is supposed to work well with wireless as well

Mandriva
http://frontal2.mandriva.com/en/downloads/mirrors

OPENSUSE
http://www.opensuse.org/Download

cheers,

Jake

So far, the only 3 distros that worked with wireless out of the box are Ubuntu 6.06 & 6.10, SimplyMEPIS (6.0, which is based on Ubuntu), and PCLinuxOS 0.92 & 0.93a.

I got wireless with openSuSE working, but that required manual setup.

You don't change distros to make wireless work. You fix the problem. Explain what hardware you have, and what errors you're getting.

Correct to a point. You should describe your hardware. However some distros set up wireless better than others. A friend of mine has a wireless card that won't work in Linux, so was dual booting, tried the "ndiswrapper" option in the PCLinuxOS Control Centre, was asked for the location of the "ini" file on the Windows CD for the driver, and it set up ndiswrapper automatically.

Depending on what you want from your Linux distro, you may want the easy, GUI-driven route, or maybe you want to take more personal control. And in that area, the choice of distro DOES make a difference!