Good evening,
I’ve been mesng around with various distributions of Linux for about a month. I started off with Gentoo when I decided to dual boot an computer I purchased off eBay back in May. Having finally settled down my Windows XP machine (combination of bad USB 2.0 card and buggy VIA motherboard chipset) I started to install Gentoo on a couple of my laptops. Well I think for the oldest laptop Gentoo is a good fit. But for my newer laptop Gentoo seem to much of an overkill. So I decided to try Unbuntu.
Unbuntu loaded just fine and looked very professional. Only problem is it was extremely difficult to mount windows share and then play windows media player encoded files (i.e. wma). I decided to use a less morally superior distribution in order to play my media files on my home network. I landed on Mepis and gave the LIVE CD a whirl. It was awesome! It detected all my hardware including my Linksys PCMCIA card and connected to my home network with no need to load ndiswrapper and the linksys drivers. I’m not sure how the Mepis distribution figured this all out but it was the most pleasant operating system install I’ve experienced EVER!
So I think I’ll re-image my Asus (the one with the flaky VIA chip) and see how that performs.