[CDBongo]

Okay quick (and mabey stupid) question, but which linux meets my needs:
Cheap
Multimedia,
Movies,
Music,
Games (if possible),
Word Processing (with spell check if possible)
nice clean interface,
fairly easy to use/install
can accept drivers for my hardware ( or doo i just have to get basically non existant linux supported drivers from the internet)

thanks,

[brendandonhu]

Its pretty hard to tell you which drivers are needed for your hardware as we don't know what hardware you have.

[CouchMaster]

Other than the games, which I don't use, they will all probably meet your needs...
You should go to distrowatch.com and experiment with the first 5 on the hit list to see which one you like the best. The spell check is the thing I like the best. If you run the Konqueror browser it automatically checks the spelling on everything you do.

[DaijoubuKun]

simple answer, suse
an answer, any distro
other answer, knoppix (knoppix is a bootable os with lots of nifty stuff)

most any distro will come with everything you need. But to be able to do EVERYTHING, you'll have to get some programs yourself. Like with multimedia: lame, mplayer, lvc, xine, vorbiz... I could go on and on, but most programs you will need to get yourself.

basically, the easiest way would be suse. you can try Fedora Core, but you'll have to get mp3 stuff yourself (they took it out).

I personally wouldn't recommend a (what I call) 'candy' OS, but that's because I'm a command line guy. For people who are new, I've always recommended suse.

Best of luck finding something that works for you

[CDBongo]

Thanks, all
and by the way, i have a biostar mb, no clue what kind something like M7VIG (thats what was on the box.) 2600+ Athlon XP Socket a 256mb of crappy pc3200 ddr ram, and 20gb hd, geforce 4 4000mx video card and any other ancient computer hardware there is to be had.

[brendandonhu]

Hardware should run on any distro about the same then. Mandriva, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Suse, Kubuntu.

[saikee]

I would stick my neck out for brendanonhu and CouchMaster by stating in my 40+ Linux installations I have never had to install a driver! There are only a few distros fail to kick start the sound or the nic. One or two needed my intervention with the video card (to switch to another generic driver to get it displayed).

[brendandonhu]

Depends on the hardware, my computer always needs special drivers (wireless and printer.)

[Joma]

I'm using Ubuntu. Go to their site and they'll send you as many free CD's as you want. That's one reason I use it.
It runs smooth and I've no problems with the installation or any other issues.

[saikee]

brendanonhu,

A fair comment on the wireless cards in Linux