Looking for Gentoo without the wait
 

I've got an HP Pavillion notebook that I've been using with Linux since forever, namely Gentoo. It's performed well, but I'm going to be too busy to maintain or reinstall Gentoo at this point, so here it is. I'm looking for a distro that:
- Uses KDE
- Is very lightweight
- Has an easy to use operate package manager (something like portage or YaST; basically, no stupid problems like dependencies / compile errors)
- Is VERY FAST
- Has a wide selection of software available
- Is relatively cutting edge (ie, has the latest stable software)
- Is not Gentoo, openSuSE
- USES KDE, NOT GNOME

So yeah. Thanks alot folks; I know there's a super-mega thread for this stuff, but I think that this is too specific to put in there. Plus, everyone else doesn't :)

EDIT: Almost forgot, system specs

1.73GHz Pentium M
512 Ram
100GB HD
Intel 900 Accel (AKA: bad, integrated graphics)

Install a base netinst debian and add whatever software you want/need. Uses a perfectly good package manager(apt-get).

Be sure once the base install is loaded to add the unstable/sid sources to your sources.list file. To get cutting edge. Then apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade.

You can add KDE or whatever else desktop you like, along with other software. This will give you a lean mean computing machine!

Can't get any better than this!

Arch - i686 binaries (*all* of them, not just the kernel), great package manager, pretty good package list.
Nothing goes on unless you select it.
Standard kernel has been 2.6.17 for a while now.

My system of choice these days on laptops.

Arch or Frugalware would be good choices here.

I just installed OpenSuSE 10.1. It positively screams! I know it takes up more disk space than you are looking for but it is really great. Actually I'm surprised that a default installation is only taking up 2.3 gigabytes.

I have an ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card. When I first installed OpenSuSE 10.1, using KDE as my desktop environment, the screen update performance was horrible. I ran the ATI driver installation. It failed but it did something good to the X.org configuration files. When I restarted X I found that KDE was very very fast. That's not counting the time that KDE takes to start itself, which is longer than on SuSE 9.2. And KDE takes a lot longer to shut itself down. (I use run level 3 and start the X software after I've logged in.)

I set up my machine to dual boot the old SuSE 9.2 and the new OpenSuSE 10.1. The performance difference between them is very noticeable. OpenSuSE 10.1 with KDE is superior.

I'd say either Arch or Slackware.

Debian it is then. One question: how easy will it be to get the intel pro/wireless 2200b/g drivers working?

You might also want to consider Kubuntu... KDE and ipw2200 drivers out of the box.

Debian fails two of your criteria.

It isn't known for being all that fast and unless you go into the "unstable" branch, isn't exactly cutting edge either.

But I'm not knocking Debian at all. It's a very stable, well established distro and you could do a lot worse. Just looking at the criteria you set up in your post.

check out the following link
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ht=mega+distro