My Acer 4530 laptop goes with the following specs. A more elaborate description can be found on ExpertTester's blog

- AMD Athlon 64 X2 QL-60 @1900 Mhz
- NVIDIA nForce 610M (MCP67-MV) Chipset
- 1 GB DDR2 SD RAM @ 667 MHz (+ 1GB Free RAM ;-)
- 160GB SATA Harddisk Drive
- 802.11b/g Wifi, Inbuilt EDR2.0 Bluetooth
- Nvidia 9100M G with 256mb Dedicated memory.
- 8x DVD RW Double Layer Optical Drive
- 3USB 2.0, 1 LAN, 1 Modem, one Express/54 slot, 1 VGA out, 1 SD/MMC reader Slot
- Webcam with optimized low-light mode
I spent a couple of weeks collecting as much information as I could regarding the various distros and finally I had narrowed down to these few contenders.
- Ubuntu - Was the first thing everyone else was suggesting and enjoys immense popularity.
- OpenSuse 11 - It seemed that a lot of people indeed got the Acer 4530 working nicely with Opensuse.
- Fedora 10 - Yet another popular distro - especially considering its Red Hat lineage.
- Mandriva 2009 - Easiest for the beginner with nice hardware detection and support.
- Gentoo - Sounds great but sadly not for the beginner by any margin.
Another choice you have is that of the GUI desktop you prefer. Most distros come with KDE and GNOME desktops though XFCE is also being considered by some. This is personal taste and I decided to start out with KDE.
Finally after googling around a lot, I decided my distro had to be Mandriva 2009 KDE One edition. I read up a lot from various forums and the options that swung the vote in Mandriva favour (atleast at the time of writing this) were
- Graphical no-hassles installer with easy disk partitioning and setup.
- Binary Beta driver for Nvidia. I work frequently on images using Gimp and wanted the display to function at native resolution (no scaling).
- Support for some proprietary drivers as well. (Okay I'll live, even if I don't have the source).
- RPM based packages with auto-update facility.
- Graphical control center with neat grouping.
I started uTorrent to download the Mandriva 2009 one edition liveCD and waited patiently for the download to end on my camel-speed connection (ETA 2 days, 4 hrs). After 2 days. I got it burned on a re-writable DVD and I was ready to get booted into the world of Linux.
Next article : Installing the OS and getting the system ready.
Interesting details about Linux and Acer.
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