One "almost there" was VectorLinux which I reviewed for this week's DistroWatch Weekly. Another is the subject of this article: sidux 2007-01. 

I say Vector was almost there because I still had one important issue with it. Although I was able to work through most of the problems with it on my laptop, I couldn't get the suspend to ram or suspend to disk to work. Honestly, I quit working on it as soon as the article on it was published, but otherwise I liked it quite a bit. Never underestimate the value of a nice looking system. Even geeks like eye candy too.

Things went a bit easier with Sidux than experienced with Vector and most laptop specific areas went really well. Sidux comes in the livecd format, so one can test it on their machines before installing it their harddrives. When one first boots Sidux, they can instantly spot the knoppix family genes.

The familar knoppix output continues until one reaches the KDE login splash. It's a customzied Sidux graphic using what looks like Marble icons for the progress indicators.

At the desktop one finds a customized background proudly signifying the system running. The panel is neat and tidy, and the desktop has a few useful icons. My initial resolution was set at 1024x768 using the nv driver. Since my desired resolution wasn't available in the xrandr/screen adjust tool, I edited the xorg file by hand.

All that was required was listing the desired 1200x800 at the designated default depth and restarting X.

Next was wireless. I attempted to use the ndiswrapper installation tool found in the menu, but that didn't seem to go very well. I got errors about not being able to install my needed windows drivers. I had already rmmod the bcm43xx et al modules and even uninstalled the bcml5 that I've discovered usually ships with distros these days.

However, a few quick entries at the commandline and I could connect to my router or my neighbor's.

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