I'm running a Compaq Evo N600c laptop with a P-III M 1.2 and 256M Ram.
I'm sick and tired of XP and have successfully run Yoper on my desktop for a few months.

So I'm pulling the switch to Linux on the laptop. However, I have yet to find the right distro. I've tried Yoper, Mepis, DSL, Suse 9.2

Had problems setting up the wireless card with Suse (Netgear MA401). After much fiddling got it to work with Yoper & Mepis.

Can't get power management on any of them.

I don't have a lot of requirements. I'm going to use it for web browsing and some openoffice type stuff. Maybe a little gimp.

These are my requirements:
Wifi
Power saving features (nothing like a hot notebook)
Fast boot time (would be nice)

Any recommendations? I'm not a real programmer, and I haven't had any success compiling kernels. I would like to do minimal work out of the box.

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

imho, the best *my-first-Linux-distro* there is.

have used it myself on laptops and have heard positive feedback from peers who range in experience with multiple distributions.

hardware detection is great.

Xandros installed and worked on my Dell C600 P3 700Mhz 256ram . It even had 3d acceleration with the ATI card from the moment I installed it.

The boot time is comparable to XP. Power management worked great for me.


You might want to take a look at Kanotix, there is a version just for laptops. It includes lots of laptop only tools and settings.