Ok, I'm trying to figure out what distro of Linux would be right for me. I tried Ubuntu and it was pretty sweet, but I could never get my wireless Internet and sound working, and not to mention I completely borked my computer while trying to get rid of it.

So here are my basic uses of my laptop:

• Listening to music with iTunes
• Send music to my iPod
• Azureus
• Macromedia Studio 8
• Alcohol 120%
• Type word documents
• watch DVDs
• Burn CDs

Which distro would you recommend, that is pretty much ready out of the box?

The only problem I see is Macromedia 8. There are ways to get Macromedia on Linux e.g. wine emulator, but it falls short. Macromedia is one of two reason I keep windoz around... the other being Half Life. But I belive the rest of your program are available for Linux on most distro they come out of the box. I would recommend Mandriva, it is slower than other distros but it is easy to use.

It is important to remember that you will have a learning curve no matter what distro you go with. No one is born with the ablility to use windoz either.

I don't think any distro will let you watch DVDs out of the box, because of copy protection or something (I can't remember exactly what). You will need to download and install about 3 packages to let you watch DVDs. I can't remember their names of the top of my head, though. I think one of them is libdvd-*something*. Do a search on LQ, because undoubtedly someone has asked about watching DVDs in Linux before.

mandriva isn't the distro if you want haevy multimedai without having to search for it. i recommend suse 10, have to dl a few files to update xine and such but it is easy to install and user friendly. the pakages you would need to install are libdvdcss, win32 codec, speex 1.1, xinelib 1.1, xine.ui and kaffine, oh and get a good firewall too someting like firestarter or guarddog.