Looking for a very stable distro

[kn0w-b1nary]

Debian Squeeze w/ XFCE 4.

Tinycore. Very minimalist, however, very fast and customizable. Just plan to take a day to set it up.

[krapp]

Arch, it may take some time to set up tho.

He said very stable.

[NormanFLinux]

OZ Unity is worth looking into. Based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, its stable and fast and sports a default netbook remix interface - the pre-Unity version.

I also run PCLOS KDE. Its a solid newbie-friendly RPM distro with apt-get and Synaptic.

In both distros, multimedia codecs are pre-installed and everything works out of the box.

They're both aimed at people who are intimated by Linux but want an easy to use and stable OS system.

[kelvin spratt]

Salix is rock solid slackware made easy peasy that just works!

[racie]

Hmm... sadly, Debian stable is a no-go. My wireless card is not supported.

Salix, huh? I've never heard of this one.

Right now I'm looking at PCLinuxOS, Slackware/Salix, and Ubuntu LTS.

But what do you guys think of OpenSUSE? It's a major distro, but none of you have said anything about it.

[krapp]

Hmm... sadly, Debian stable is a no-go. My wireless card is not supported.

You mean it's not supported out of the box because there isn't a free driver for it?

[snowpine]

Hmm... sadly, Debian stable is a no-go. My wireless card is not supported.

What kind of wireless card do you have? If your card requires a "nonfree" firmware, then most distros will require you to install it.

For example I have a Broadcom wireless card. Debian cannot support this card "out of the box" but all I need to do is follow the instructions on the wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx

[ilovelinux33467]

But what do you guys think of OpenSUSE? It's a major distro, but none of you have said anything about it.

openSUSE is an excellent distro and I find it very stable.

[screaminj3sus]

Hmm... sadly, Debian stable is a no-go. My wireless card is not supported.

Salix, huh? I've never heard of this one.

Right now I'm looking at PCLinuxOS, Slackware/Salix, and Ubuntu LTS.

But what do you guys think of OpenSUSE? It's a major distro, but none of you have said anything about it.

Opensuse 11.4 is a great distro.

[racie]

You mean it's not supported out of the box because there isn't a free driver for it?

What kind of wireless card do you have? If your card requires a "nonfree" firmware, then most distros will require you to install it.

For example I have a Broadcom wireless card. Debian cannot support this card "out of the box" but all I need to do is follow the instructions on the wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx

Yes, it requires a nonfree driver.

Long story short: the installation tries to detect the driver located on my USB drive(s) and fails and Debian needs to update if I want to install it manually. Sadly, I cannot update without the internet.

Don't worry, I'm not just giving up right away. I've joined the Debian forums and searched for solutions, but I've yet to get my answer.

Still distro hopping atm.