everyday internetwork ecology
…networked media are everywhere in our everyday lives; often they are blatant, sometimes subtle.

Adam’s GNU/Linux Distro Page

Once again this is a very rough version but it’s a start…

About GNU/Linux
First of all, I want to acknowledge and endorse the use of the full name for the operating system which is GNU/Linux. If you want to know more about this then check out an article about it on the FSF’s website, or have a read of Richard M. Stallman’s collection of essays on the topic entitled “Free Software, Free Society” (2002) - (which you can get from the fsf website).
GNU/Linux Distributions
 
There’s a nice page at wikipedia on free software which is a nice place to start. 
 
I currently run OpenSUSE on my desktop computer and also my notebook. I liked it because it was friendly to my hardware, but putting it on my notebook has been a bit hazardous in some ways, so far.
My choice after SUSE for a desktop OS would have to be MEPIS, which is a fast little LiveCD distro that is quick to load up and has really good hardware detection… and is also quick to install if you decide you want to put it on your computer permanently. MEPIS is based on Ubuntu (see below), and possibly in the future back to Debian…  which makes it a convenient way of getting the slick-ness of Ubuntu with some other nice touches from the MEPIS team, including a KDE desktop instead of Ubuntu’s GNOME.
Another good choice that I have come across in the last couple of months is PClinuxOS which seems to be a very solid and reliable contender for the coveted crown that Ubuntu has at the moment. This one is based on Mandriva (formerly Mandrake), another WindowsXP look-alike. I put this on my notebook for a while but it didn’t play nicely with my video card, so I replaced it with SUSE when 10.3 came out.
I feel like I should mention Ubuntu since it’s really popular at the moment. I have tried it in various forms since the Breezy Badger version, but the liveCD always takes forever to load up on both of my computers. I installed it and used it for a short while but there is something about it that just hasn’t clicked for me personally. It comes with the gnome desktop by default, but there is a KDE version (called Kubuntu, funnily enough). I haven’t used the KDE version. That said, this is a good choice if you are not a computer novice but you’re curious about GNU/Linux. There’s plenty of support on the internet for ubuntu due to it’s popularity. Also Xubuntu with a nice XFCE desktop.
I like what Knoppix has become as a liveCD, especially with the Beryl faux-3D desktop which is very slick indeed (but probably meaningless as all the major distros have beryl/compiz/metisse). This is a distro that has a lot going for it if you need a portable system. Like many livecd distros you can use a USB stick to store a profile with system settings or files that you work on. Pretty handy.
I quite liked the recent Mandriva liveCD with it’s new pseudo-3D desktop compositing environment called Metisse. The window scheme from metisse was really nice (it’s called La Ora I believe), and I wonder if you can get something like it for KDE? I haven’t used it a lot but I like the possibilities that the new desktop offers.
As far as other distros go, there’s a few specialty kind of ones around.
There’s a couple of “security / penetration testing” distros that I have tried, with mixed results: one called Backtrack which had a clean presentation and a nice range of apps, and another one called STD-Knoppix (I think it had fluxbox as it’s window manager) that I got an early version of so it seemed a bit less impressive than Backtrack. Neither of them liked my wireless card in my notebook which stopped me from using either of them in any depth. How else am I supposed to use them to “test” wireless network connectivity (in my home, I mean)?
Damn Small Linux is a neat distro with a really small footprint so it takes up hardly any room on a mini-CD - or alternatively on a USB drive which you can load it from. I have a version of it that runs inside a little emulator window so you can run it over the top of windows if you need it for some reason (I’m not sure if that one is still available). The software on it is not the latest sort of resource hog technology, but it is very useable in terms of what is included. 
Another distro that I quite liked was a multi-media-based one called Dynebolic. I used v1.4.1 and it had a really nice selection of software that you could use if you needed a production environment on the go that could run on different hardware, and didn’t always have the resources to take a portable computer with you. Included in this particular distro was a
I have recently tried v1.0 of GNUstep - a completely Free Software distro with no proprietary stuff included- but it didn’t like my hardware and I had troubles even getting it to load. I did get it to work eventually and it was okay. Another GNOME one that looked like ubuntu. I have a feeling it is ubuntu without the proprietary stuff.
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blah blah. back in the mid 90s we used to put “under construction” animated GIFs around pages like this. huzzah!

maybe i’ll make this next bit a separate page altogether.. we’ll see..
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Repos
http://software.opensuse.org/download/mozilla/openSUSE_10.2/

http://download.videolan.org/pub/vlc/SuSE/10.2

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http://mirror.griffith.edu.au/linux/packman/suse/10.2/

http://mirror.griffith.edu.au/linux/suse10.2/repo/oss/

http://mirror.pacific.net.au/linux/packman/suse/10.2/

http://software.opensuse.org/download/OpenOffice.org/openSUSE_10.2/

http://www.linuxclues.com/articles/01.htm- md5sum -

to install freemind - http://chintanrajyaguru.com/blog/tech/installing-freemind-on-suse-linux-10.2.html