Not your average good distro' question
 

I know its been asked a million times, but I need some suggestions now.

Ok, I've used quite a few, last one being mepis.

I've used redhat 9, which worked pretty good, but was pretty slow.

Then I went to mandrake 9.2, which worked great. But was very slow, it took atleast 5 seconds to open firefox.

Then I tried gentoo, which I eventually after many attempts got installed, but it didn't seem to run too great. The emerge command wasn't to my liking. It took forever to compile applications, where in mandrake, it only took a few minutes.

Then I tried Slackware 9.1 a few times, and it didn't seem to run too well, I couldn't get my video card to work at all.

Then, I went to suse 9.1. Worked fast, and very good. But, the graphics were really choppy, and went I went to go configure the video card, the screen would go black, and I couldn't do squat.

So, last and finally, I tried mepis. Which was pretty fast (which is what I'm looking for), but when trying to compile programs, such as gaim, it asks for GTK+. But, thats for gnome (correct?) and mepis doesn't install gnome, nor give the option. and when I try apt-get install gaim, it messes up because of the dependencies.

So.. Finally on to my question. I'm looking for something that is pretty fast, and stable, but very good on hardware detection and configuration. I know a little bit about linux (command line and config files and what not), and I can find info after a while to fix my problems, but I'd like it to be easier than that. Mandrake worked great as far as hardware detection and what not, but it was really bloated and ran slow.

If anyone knows a fix to suse, that would be great. Seemed like that one worked the best.

Anyone have any other suggestions??

I've thought about libra net, but I'm not sure what to download. Will this distro work pretty good? It has pretty decent reviews.

Thanks alot.

Mepis and Libranet are both based on Debian. I would go for libranet. Or, you might consider Debian Sarge.

Now, would I have the same problems that I did with mepis? Such as the compiling problems?

Sounds to me like you don't need a new distro so much as just some help with configuring your video... You said it was 'choppy' - could it be you simply didn't have hardware acceleration enabled for your card?
If you were reasonably happy with Mandrake 9.x, maybe just try Mandrake 10 - it is supposed to be snappier than the older version, thanks to improvements such as kernel 2.6 series... Or even Fedora - it's pretty good with Gnome stuff, since it is their preferred desktop.

I don't know I us slackware 10. I got my ati mach 64 working good, for a crappy ati card. Are you sure you input the settings right?

-As for a distro with good videocard, try some live cds. Since they do not install on the HDD they need good autodetection. Try ones like Knoppix, Morphix, Jollix, Slax, NavynOS or just go to http://www.distrowatch.com and click search and then look at the list of live distros...

Hope that helps.

I don't really want to do a live CD. They work good, but are slow. I want a normal distro. I'm not sure as far as the hardware acceleration. But I couldn't configure it, it did it all during the install, but when I went to change it, the scrren goes black and I can't do anything.

The only think stopping me from getting mandrake 10 is that I don't have a ton of bandwidth, and I can't find any iso's.

I was thinking about running fedora core, sense it seems to be pretty popular. Anyone know a good ftp server to get some iso's from for it? Or mdk10?

Thanks for the help.

Mandrake 10
http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=29

Fedora Core 2
http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=64

Kanotix and do the hd install. It's fast stable and you get apt-get goodness.

http://kanotix.com/index.php?&newlang=eng