I noticed some distros dont even boot up with my laptop. and my friends also

Amd Athlon XP-M 2800+ 768mb DDR 30gb ATI Radeon

Fedora or Suse should work. Which distro didn't work for the laptop?

well not that i wanted to use it anyways, but Ubuntu didn't
Mepis 2004.6 didn't either, but it booted on my Desktop (Celeron"Coppermine" aka Craperon) 634mhz 256mb 20gb Intel i810 video) but it stays stuck half way installing 48% or 51% . ProMepis also stays stuck on my desktop, but it installed fine on my laptop ProMEpis beta2 that is, I aint wasting my cds with betas anymore.

Right now the 2 bleeding edge distros that work in my laptop flawless is Kanotix and Frugalware.

But I just decided to install XP and use linux via vmware instead , since I already have my desktop fulltime linux and just keep learning there

Mandrake seems to work fine. I used 9.x on a Sony Vaio laptop and a thinkpad.

SuSE 9.2 added a lot of laptop support to the distro. Fast-profile switching, better power-management, as well as other improvements make it a good candidate. I tried a few distros on my HP ze4230 but always came back to SuSE for out-of-box support. It even runs my lousy Conexant win-modem by default, which the other distros couldn't seem to do without tweaking (Keep in mind, I like tweaking, but only on my more important machines).

XP-M 2800+ sounds like one of the 32-bit crippled versions of the r3000z laptops. I've been looking at the nx9105 /r3000us which is XP-M 3000+ cpu.

SuSe9.1 Personal is said to run "flawlessly" on the r3000us -- see the
r3000 forums

Fedora, Gentoo, Slackware are also said to run on these - see www.linux-on-laptops.com

What I can't get to boot on the nx9105 so far is Knoppix. I'm told up to v2.6 won't boot on it either.

Your success with Kanotix suggests I should try that. Which version are you using on your laptop?

Linux on laptops is hard stuff. It took me literally 70 hours to get the wireless (using WINDOWS binaries via ndiswrapper, then debug the system since the Wifi was failing randomly. Turns out the IRQ's aren't native, so I disabled them in LILO), screen (find right refresh rate), and touchpad (install the synaptics touchpad) working on my hp pavilion zv5000.

Here's a great site for linux laptops: http://www.linux-laptop.net/

DAMN .. Travers 70hrs

I still haven't been able to get wireless on my laptop with XP. My microsoft wireless -g adapter is probably damaged =\ waste of money

i have an old dell c610 and i have loaded mandrake 10, suse 9.2 and gentoo and had no problems (except screen size in gentoo, but with some determination and 3 red bulls i was able to get it fixed!)

Slack 9 and 10 both worked flawless on my laptop

For my inspiron 5100 ive used:
Slack-Current (what im using now)
Slack-10
Slack-9

Mandrake-9.1, 9.2, 10

FC3

Knoppix - 3.4, 3.6, 3.7
KnoppixSTD

Suse 9.2 and 9.2 Live Eval

Ubuntu live eval

F.I.R.E

Suse 9.2 Pro worked perfectly on my Gatyeway 450rog. The only thing that I had to do was enable 3d acceleration in sax2.

Only one I'd like to add is FC2.

Yoper is working on my Averatec 5400 with no extra work on my part.

I installed Yoper on my amd athlon xp-m 2800+ laptop and after the boot loader it says loading yoperating system .......................................................................... and then nothing black screen ,

Knoppix 3.7 doesnt work on my laptop either, the boot loader shows up and after that black screen.
Mepis worked PRo and Simply
Kanotix just rocks
Ubuntu doesnt work haha
VidaLinux works but theres a dhcp problem with laptops
VEctorLInux works
Frugalware works
Mandrake going to try
PcLiNUxOS8 lacks ATI drivers