Choosing distro...

[basicxman]

Hey everyone, I'm trying to decide on a distribution for my laptop. Its an hp pavilion dv2910us, luckily the wireless card works with linux without any customization. Usually I use Ubuntu but I'm wondering if there's something more powerful...

I'm going to be doing basically the following things:

• IRC
• Pidgin
• Firefox
• PHP Coding
• MySQL
• Running a local server (just for development)
• Coding with Notepad++, VIM, etc... (one of the reasons I'm switching from Windows is a more advanced terminal)

computer specs are 3GB DDR2 RAM, Dual core 1.83GHz intel CPU

Looking for gnome user interface, speed, and security. Would like to be able to use downloadable themes...

Any ideas? Thanks

[reed9]

Not sure what you mean by more powerful, especially since what you're looking for is all fairly standard stuff. Any distro has all of that available, (well some lighter distros might not have GNOME, but otherwise) and it really comes down to personal preference.

If you want near total control over your system and to spend many hours learning about linux, use Gentoo or Crux.

If you want a hell of a lot of control over your system, and want to learn a lot about linux, but don't want to spend the time source-based distros require, use Arch or Slackware.

If you don't want to bother hand editing config files and want the system to basically take care of things for you, use Ubuntu or Debian.

If you're a masochist, use Fedora. Alright, a lot of people love Fedora, and it's been key in moving forward and developing a lot of great technology. But I've never cared for it.

[computerophil]

If you want to change try out some LiveCDs so you find where you fell better.

I like Openmamba, Sabayon, Mandriva and sidux,...
Maybe one of those is what you are searching for.

[gruven]

That may have similar hardware to my (well, my wife's) laptop that I had put linux on a while ago.

It was a HP Pavilion dv2000t (custom built). Core2Duo T5600 (1.83 GHz x 2), 2 GB DDR2, 80 GB HDD, Intel HDA sound, webcam, synaptics touchpad, nvidia 7200 go, 14.1" widescreen monitor, Intel 3945 A/B/G wireless.

If it sounds similar, I have pretty much documented everything I did on that laptop with Gentoo and Debian/Ubuntu on my website. Just let me know.

[chigurh]

The time I've spent with Gentoo, it seems to me I've learned about a lot more about Gentoo than Linux ...

[techieMoe]

The time I've spent with Gentoo, it seems to me I've learned about a lot more about Gentoo than Linux ...

Some of the more do-it-yourself distributions suffer from this problem. You can be a wizard at Portage (Gentoo's package manager) and know little to nothing about Pacman (the Arch package manager) and still know even less about the more commonly-used apt (Debian) or yum (Fedora).

A truly generic, bare-bones Linux install is available in Linux From Scratch (more a set of instructions than a distribution), but I wouldn't wish that on anyone but the extremely dedicated (or bored).


....but I digress. To the original poster: your requirements are far too vague. Everything you've listed above will fit every distribution on the planet, more or less. Unless you have specific requirements our best advice is to use several different distributions (starting with the more popular ones from a site like DistroWatch) and see what grabs you. Best of luck.