You can get a distro based on Gentoo (some equivalent of Mephis or Ubuntu). Im planning to test Ututo-XS, developed by a friend of mine. It installs a desktop, anmy missing thing you can emerge it. Right now Im thinking about changing from Redhat to gentoo, as my hardware is getting obsolete and i need to get the most possible perfomance from it.
And about ATI drivers, I havent had problems to make my radeon 7000 work with DRI drivers (it runs Eternal Lands pretty well).

Went to the ATI site today, clicked on the Linux drivers, ATI 9600, mobile... and those assholes said they don't have an OpenGL driver for my mobile ATI card, and to contact my laptop manufacturer. Yeah, right!

Yeah I've used quite a few different distro and the one I liked the most was gentoo.

over the years I've user suse 6.2-9.1, redhat 7-9, fedora core 1/2 (and alot of the tests), unbunta v1, various versions of debain, linux from scratch and gentoo. While some of the other distros are alot easier to setup they are harder to maintain, anything with rpms is just asking for trouble imho. debian is nice in theory and I've heard a lot succeus with the distro but I almost always run into some sorta apt-get error and I never really found a real solution for it.

Also forget getting ATI 3d acceleration working with over half those distro unless you wana search forums and rebuild your kernel all day. Althought I did become quite good with this and it did work it was much much slower than teh windows drivers and had glitches with certain things. Nvidia is the way to go for linux hands down, I applaud thier support.

The real issue I had with everything except gentoo was installing uncommon software and certain things like video codecs and the whatnot. gentoo all you have to do is issue one command and portage with do the rest. You never have to reinstall a new distro to upgrade to the next versions because there are no versions everything just updates on release. I understand not wanting to go through the install proccess however as it takes a long time and there is a possiblity linux just doesn't support some peice of hardware yet (althought this is what you use a livecd for).

If your looking for a way to install the fglrx drivers (ati radeon support) I can guide you through it most likey but be prepared to get just a tad frusterated and spend alot of time.

Quote: Original post by Raduprv
I never said I don't have the ability to install it, HOWEVER I don't feel like spending about two hours following 10 steps, then another few hours while it compiles, only to find out that some hardware of mine is not supported (some reviews showed that my Gentoo has some problems with my laptop).
It was more about motivation (why would I spend my time installing gentoo, when I can try other distros that are more user friendly).

Stage 3 install with a packages cd is done in under an hour.

And which is better: Taking twice as long to install or taking twice as long to install anything new and having to totally reinstall periodically?

You only install once; you use it alot more. Gentoo trades some install time and complexity for making day-to-day usage a real pleasure.

I use Mepis, it is pretty cool. I use it because

- it fits on 1 cd
- easy install
- based on debian, so you get all the benefits of apt
- i prefer kde
- comes with a bunch of great software, including firewall (guarddog)
- can use it as a live cd to show people how cool linux can be
- it just works
- new releases come out all the time
- i can easily upgrade without destroying the data in my /home directory

It is just easy to use, so I can concentrate on developing software and not on trying to hack the distro to get it to work right all the time.

Quote: Original post by Seoushi
If your looking for a way to install the fglrx drivers (ati radeon support) I can guide you through it most likey but be prepared to get just a tad frusterated and spend alot of time.

Would be interested on seeing that as well.

Quote: Original post by 41ph4_r4p70r

Quote: Original post by Promit
He liked Gentoo the best.

prrrrrr, wrong

Quote: Original post by Raduprv
Then I was about to install XP on it, when I went to distrowatch.com to see if there is anything new. There I found Mepis.

... Have you heard of sarcasm?

Quote: Original post by Raduprv
Went to the ATI site today, clicked on the Linux drivers, ATI 9600, mobile... and those assholes said they don't have an OpenGL driver for my mobile ATI card, and to contact my laptop manufacturer. Yeah, right!

Ignore that. Speaking as a laptop user with a Radeon 9600, all you need to do is pretend you're a desktop. They'll work "fine" or at least not worse than ATI's Linux drivers on any other system.

well I don't feel like writing a totaly new guide but here is a post I made awhile back on how I did it with overclockix (another debina based distro) so it should be simular in proceedure.

http://www.overclockix-forum.theaog.com/viewtopic.php?p=539

Quote: Original post by clayasaurus
I use Mepis, it is pretty cool. I use it because

- it fits on 1 cd
- easy install
- based on debian, so you get all the benefits of apt
- i prefer kde
- comes with a bunch of great software, including firewall (guarddog)
- can use it as a live cd to show people how cool linux can be
- it just works
- new releases come out all the time
- i can easily upgrade without destroying the data in my /home directory

It is just easy to use, so I can concentrate on developing software and not on trying to hack the distro to get it to work right all the time.

You summed up what I think of mepis pretty well, although it has a few negatives too:

wireless card support doesn't seem that great.
-synaptics not installed by default
-sound doesn't want to work for users not created at installation
-won't save to flash drive until umount is called

I'm sure the last three could be dealt with easy enough. I'd also like to see mepis offer some more updated packages like ubuntu does, but it's defineatly the easiest to use distro I've tried!