I have some problems with finding suitable distros fot one desktop and one laptop.

The desktop:

Does anyone know a good distro that both ivy bridge display controller is supported and canon pixma mp140 can be shared (CUPS, samba)? The printer used to work before my old mobo broke down. (Mint 8 I think, and Lucid Puppy 5.2.8)

It seems that to have working printing, the distro has to be far too old to support ivy bridge, and the updates to the printing subsystem have broken the compatibility with older printer drivers.

The laptop:

The laptop is IBM Thinkpad T42, and the problems are sleeping and the touchpad. It wakes up from the sleep fine, but about half of the time it doesn't go to sleep, but gets "jammed" in a non-responsive state.

The other problem is really jumpy touchpad.

The desktop and laptop distros can be different. If there just were distros that work...

For help with the Thinkpad, see
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T42
The "how to install" articles are from way-back-when, but those IBMs are very tolerant. My X31 is still going strong! There's an article on the touchpad, but most people's sleep problem seems to be waking up again. Perhaps APM rather than APCI might work better? As for a distro, I'd go for something conservative and designed for the older computer. I use Salix, which is fine once it starts but loads slowly. AntiX might work well and it's now based on Debian stable.

I've not heard of any recent distro having ivy bridge problems, and the printer has a driver:
http://www.canon.co.uk/Support/Consu...&type=download
What's the problem with using the current Mint?

For the desktop I've tried Mint 14, Mint 15 (both 32 and 64 bit), Debian 6, PC-BSD 9.1 and FreeBSD 9.1.
Mint 14 and 15 (both) Printer freezes at the end of printing work. I have tried the ppa:s etc, but no luck. With Mint 15 also trying to find something from an older NTFS-disk (going from a directory to another) seems to cause the cinnamon to crash.

It seems that the old Canon driver (2.80) is incompatible with newer versions of CUPS or Gutenprint. Also tried with those: https://launchpad.net/~michael-gruz/+archive/canon
with no luck.

Debian Live DVD didn't boot.

PC-BSD install DVD didn't boot.

FreeBSD had the versions messed up - I should have to compile pretty much everything manually.

Oh, and I remember that at the time most distros didn't support ivy bridge. I had to get a ppa for Mint 14. At the time Puppy didn't support ivy bridge at all.

For the laptop I tried some distros (don't remember anymore whics, but at least Debian 6) before settling with Mint 13. I got the touchpad usable (found some older release + some configuration) although it's still a bit jumpy.

The sleeping works - doesn't work - works again ...
I remember that I gouldn't make the touchpad nearly uasble with debian.

Ah, an I can now add that Debian 7.1 installer doesn't find any CD drivers, and the installation stops there.

BSD has very poor hardware support, or so I'm told. I note that in Linux you go for Debian and its derivatives. Have you tried something different?

I've seen your other post on the printer, and all I can think of is to install a 32-bit Linux (or get a new printer!)

I've been trying both 32 and 64 bit Linuxes - no luck.
I have been thinking about puppy, but in case of troubles, it's hard to rescue (savefile).
I used to have a full install, and I learned not to do that any more. It has to be frugal.

I really haven't tried many other, but Arch seems interesting.
Mageia didn't boot, It lost its CD.

I'm not thrilled about getting a new printer either, because my current one DID work, but due to updates, doesn't work any more. Any ideas of printers with about as cheap colours that doesn't drop from the support after some updates? Btw, I'm writing this with my laptop running Windows Vista. With that the printer works fine. Too bad this can't be used to share my old disk.

Just not nice to find out the the money spent on a new mobo and processor went down the drain.

My HP inkjet worked with Fedora 1 to 14 and Debian 5, until it finally died with circuit board failure. They are probably the best supported make.

Funny, Debian Live 7.0.0 (64-bit) booted fine all of a sudden.

Any idea how to add a printer in the Debian Live?
The localhost:631 said (yesterday) that I don't have the rights.

Aha, not any more. Today the iceweasel crashes if I give it "http://localhost:631".
Or at least the iceweasel disappears, and if I start it again it suggests restoring the CUPS page - except if I try, the iceweasel disappears again.

[edit]
Oh yes, I remember seeing this before:
Trying to start an application fails and an error message is shown (briefly): "Failed to launch 'Terminal' Failed to execute child process "gnome...