I am fairly new to Linux and I need help picking a distro. I have a Dell Inspiron E1505 with 1GB RAM and a 80GB hard drive. I am dual booting it with Vista Home Premium. I have tried Ubuntu but I didn't think it had enough on it. I also tried Fedora 7. It was my favorite out of all the live CD's, but It wouldn't load after the install. I also tried MEPIS, but I had quite a few driver problems. I also liked Ubuntu Studio, because of it's video and audio editing( which I do a lot of), but it had problems loading also. I then tried Linux Mint, which had fixed everything I didn't like about plain Ubuntu, but I like GNOME a lot better than KDE. I then tried Mandriva and it didn't impress me the way Fedora did. I just need a distro that can get along with Windows and is good for my pictures and music. I will also be willing to try any distro I have already tried.
93jam

I'm not quite sure what the "problems" were on the other distros. Were you using Live CD/DVDs?

I personally have tried half-a-dozen distros and keep coming back to SUSE/openSUSE. You might download the live DVD and give it a whirl. They are becoming more GNOME-centric if that is your preference.

http://www.opensuse.org/

http://download.opensuse.org/distrib...GM-LiveDVD.iso

The link below (Getting started...) may help.

Sabayon is about the prettiest usable heavyweight distro I've used.

try this distro chooser:
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

if you don't find something else, i would give fedora another try since it was your favorite. try to find out why it's not loading rather than just giving up on it. it's a good distro.

Did you customise you Inspiron? I notice it has an ATI graphic card which is always a problem with Linux.

My experience in the last year is with an Acer TravelMate with Intel 855 & and a Dell Inspiron with Intel 915 graphics. Both have 17" XVGA widescreen displays, and both need the 915resolution tool to get the display resolution correct.

I have stuck with openSuse 10.2 as it gives me the best set of tools for what I want to do, and also the least hassle during the install. Despite the slowness I find YaST does the job as a package manager and all round config tool. I hardly ever have to go to the command line. After a lot of trial and error with Gnome, I've gone back to KDE for the desktop.

I've tried are various flavours Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and got frustrated with the way it didn't have a proper root user, but now I'm giving Kubuntu 7 a second chance.

I had FC6 on a desktop for more than 6 months, but thats now Suse 10.2. I never got it working the way I wanted on a laptop.

The only other distro I've given a serious look is PCLinuxOS 2007. On one of the laptop it seems to have all the right things to make the installation easy. It even told me I needed to install 915resolution to get the display I wanted, and has a graphics tool for setting up ndiswrapper for the wifi card. I stopped playing when I couldn't get to grips with the ntp config. It kept giving me stupid results, and I don't have time at the moment to work out what was going wrong.

When Slackware gets settled with the 2.6.n kernel I will give it another go, but at the moment I don't have the time to do the tweaking it needs to do what I want.

For the time being, Suse 10.2 gives me the best combination of working without fuss, and tools to learn how to make things like Samba work easily. When I decided to convert the Dell from Kubuntu 6 to Suse, I had it back on my home network, surfing the internet and printing to a remote printer within 4 hours, using the Internet Install and with a number of distractions.

As far as dual-booting, the Acer has XP Pro which I hardly use, the Dell has XP Home which I never use (except every two week to check it is up to date, which usually takes several hours!), and my desktop has Win2K which gets used every few days to check that PDF and Word files made with OpenOffice are OK.

I tried Dream Linux Multimedia Edition and it is having some problems with the wireless card. The only way it will boot is in recovery mode. It takes about 7 - 10 minutes to boot that way. I also tried Fedora 7 but it did the same thing. I will try Sabyon and openSUSE. Also are the Mac OS X like bar that was at the bottom and the Mac window theme avalible in a distro or on the internet somewhere?

Mephis
http://www.mepis.org/

Blag
http://www.blagblagblag.org/download/