Finding the right distro for my Thinkpad T61 – Part1

I am a long time Linux user (almost 10 years), but I do not consider myself an expert by any means. I guess I would consider myself a power user. I started with a floppy disk install of Slackware. From there I moved to RedHat, Mandrake, Vector, and SUSE. I used SUSE’s 9.2 through 10.1 versions. After that, I started searching for an alternative. I tried Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Mepis, Freespire, and finally settled on PCLinuxOS. I really love PCLinuxOS and have enjoyed it for about a year and six months. It is not coming off of my desktop machine for sure. However, I have just acquired a very nice ThinkPad T61, with the new Intel GMA X3100. The fact that Intel released open source drivers for this graphics card made me chose it over the Nvidia options, and of course the fact that it consumes less power and gives longer battery life was also a consideration. However, being that this chipset is so new, I wasn’t too sure that my favorite distro was ready to support it with its usual polish. So, this was the perfect opportunity to do some distro hopping and see how the rest of the Linux distros are doing, especially in regards to supporting my hardware.

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