Distro with good hardware support....

[Moonshinerat]

Hi everyone, this is my first post on a Linux form so please bear with me.

I am looking at running VMWare on my Dell Inspiron 640m laptop. As I support many different O/S's for my customers (unfortunately mainly MS stuff) I have to keep the Vista installation on here and as I now have Fedora up and running properly after three weeks I am reluctant to start changing MBRs, bootsectors and partitions. This means I cannot install XP Pro (again unfortunately this has the best hardware support) as XP will wipe off my MBR which is ready set up for multibooting.

So, I found myself at Distro Watch looking for a Linux that has good hardware support (I have a Dell 1390 wireless card, should have bought the Intel) but there were just too many to look at.

Can any one suggest an uptodate distro with good hardware support and low resource use for VMWare? I don't need a multitude of office software, drawing packages, games and editors, just a solid host with easy to configure hardware.

Many thanks.

[tvilkov]

Most distros have a bit of a problem with the wireless networking, but I'm sure there's tutorials to get them running. For the hardware support, I guess you should have a look at the top most popular distros. Personally, I'm running Fedora Core 6 on my desktop (had problems with sound unitl updated to kernel 2.6.20) and Debian Etch on my 3 year old laptop (no hardware probs here). I guess you'll just have to try them out and see which one works the best on your machine.

[devils casper]

i would suggest you to try Ubuntu 7.04 BUT thats my opinion only. check this thread.