Specific Distro Needs

[karljs]

Hi all,
I am a CS grad student and need to pick an adequate distro for my somewhat specific needs hardware needs. I've read through the newbie guide and done quite a bit of research online but still haven't come to a conclusion. I'm a reasonably experienced Linux user but am at a loss for this specific issue.

The problem is primarily that my laptop's network hardware is brand new and doesn't seem supported in kernels before 2.6.32. Now I know I could run Arch Linux or Gentoo or something with a rolling release system, but honestly I hate the hoops I have to jump through to keep everything running smoothly -- I'm not a sysadmin.

Is there a distro that is primarily well-tested and stable but makes it REALLY EASY to run a more recent kernel version? Of course I can build the kernel from source on any distro but I'd rather have backported or testing packages to make things simple and quick.

Any advice is appreciated!

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

You can go here and see which distros are using the latest kernel:

DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

If you want to find out about distros using any of the earlier kernels, enter the kernel release of your choice in the search box and conduct a new search.

Hope you find something you like.

[karljs]

Thanks, I didn't know DW had this functionality.