My good mate Larrykins is a genius. Mepis is fantastic, at least on our Dell laptop.
I haven’t tried the modem, but the onboard graphics, sound and LAN work out of the box, and even the 3Com Atheros-based wireless works. Yeah baby. It even plays DVDs, if there’s no CSS. As it happens, I seem to have a DVD here that seems to have lost that at some point.
Next step? Install DeCSS :-).
Oh yeah- It’s waaay quicker than XP too.
I’ve heard very good things from the beta!
It rocks bigtime. It’s a live CD, but with a *really nice* installer that just works. It’s Debian-based too :-). It’s a bit ‘twiddly’ for a server, but great for a workstation.