hello everyone,

So I got my new computer 2 weeks ago and have been trying to find a good distro to put on it. I've installed my normally Suse 10.2 first but it didn't load any GUI , then I went ahead and tried Gentoo, which was a long exercise in learning about memory locations for the kernel and x86_64. I've just tried out the Ubuntu knowing the trade mark line of "just works", but it didn't load X and the solution the site gave me to load my Nvidia drivers requires X (lol) or so many dependancys that I could figure out how to load them using the annoying So my question is what distro can I go with which will give me a Graphical support and possibly be easy to load my AGN 4965 intel wireless.

Config:
HP pavilion dv9500t
Intel Core 2 Duo T7300
2GB ram
17' 1680x1050
Nvidia 8600GS (PCI-e card)
Intel 4965AGN Wireless
2x100Gb
Bluetooth, SD card reader

Any help would be great. If I'm being stupid please and the distro's do support my card please let me know how you got it working because all I have is just the terminal.

"just works" is a the trademark slackware line.. not ubuntu.
give slackware a shot, also write down the link to the page with the direct link to the nvidia driver installer. you can use links to browse this page after install.
Also. Slackware's stock xorg.conf can in most cases get X going (albeit 1024x768 res max and no direct rendering).

On a side note.. what is a "bleeding edge tech" doing, not being able to get around this on his own?

Yea :$ I know. Well I've been a Suse user really for the past 3 years and Suse always has the slight warm "i'll sort it all out for you" feeling.
My Gentoo is only installed on one box and I had a lot of help installing it. So in lots of ways I'm still a newbie.

Thanks for the slackware idea. Didn't think about that one yet. I'm downloading it currently and burning the CD soon.

Really, just about any distro ought to support your video card in un-accelerated mode, you should only have any kind of hassle with it if you try to get 3D acceleration working (because of proprietary drivers, dubious legality, principles, that kind of thing).

Firstly, let me clear up one thing: You write You did ask it to install X, didn't you (and, therefore, the lol means that you think this is obvious and not ridiculous)?

First thing is to make sure that you just ask for plain, vanilla X (plus KDE/Gnome/etc to taste) during install. Once you've got that going, and if you are still interested, upgrade to 3D acceleration.

So what I guess I should have said is that the solution required a working GUI which needed X. Yes I did install X! My lol was that the solution needed something that I was trying to get, video support.

And no, so far no distro has loaded a GUI of any sorts
Suse Gentoo, Ubuntu, Zenwalk, CentOS, fedora, Knoppix and still downloading Slack. Heck even when I wiped Vista off the pc and tried to put XP on it wouldn't install because it didn't understand the graphic card. Vista even had issues when I loaded it back on (before any one asks why I still use M$, some programs only work in windoze)

Give sidux a try, use the tool smxi to install video