I'm looking for a point-and-click installable distro to put on a PII 350, 192mb RAM machine, big hard drive. The computer is mostly going to be used for browsing internet, especially multimedia and audio/video streaming websites, with formats like qt, rm, wmv, etc. Is there a distro that is easy to install and has browser multimedia plugins right out of the box or with little tweaking, achievable by a windows user/linux noob (myself)? Thanks for any suggestions.

"multimedia" (video especially) "out of the box" will be difficult in any distro, most codecs for video are proprietry and thus aren't free to be distributed as a part of most distributions, so you might need to still look into picking up most codecs, especially for qt,rm, wmv.

If you're interested in video streaming VLC (video lan client) is a client designed around streaming media (especially self-streaming across networks).

But a combination of frequently updating video formats and proprietry codecs/software means that a "solution" out of the box without any need for poking a bit probably isn't going to happen.

p.s. Even windows can't do most .wmv out the box, it sure can't do rm or qt so this isn't a fault of linux, it's a fault of people for using Qt, wmv or rm. However a lot of rips are moving over to more open codec these days, although the popular divx I don't think is open/free either; is xvid?

ror, thanks for your insight!

Are there any distros that, besides codecs, satisfy what I described? I could try installing codecs afterwards.