The Battle for the right Linux Distribution for my Emachine D730

For so long now many comment and reviews have been written, all pointing to the hostility of Acer Emachine towards the free and open source operating system or as we call it Linux Distribution! Since it would fun and informative on my part to actually disprove such accusation I decided to do a simple experiment with my acer Emachine D730.

For all the laptop (3) we bought it was always an Emachine laptop why? Well aside that its practical, it cater to the needs of my family, the specification can be line-up with some of the heavyweight in the business with some spare to loose so to speak, and for having a local branch here in our area that will/may/can service our unit in-case of something weird happen along the way.

Well enough with the unending saga of why Emachine, lets go on with the result of my simple review  for my Perfect Linux Flavor for my Emachine, first the following Linux Distribution where all tested;

1.Puppy Lucid 5.10
2.Linux Mint Gloria KDE
3.linuxmint-9-kde-dvd-amd64
4.linuxmint-debian-201009-gnome-dvd-i386
5.OpenSuse 11.3
6.Fedora 13
7.ubuntu-10.04-netbook-i386
8.Ylmf_OS_3.0
9.debian-506-i386-kde-CD-1
10.XP-like_puppy_ENG
11.debian-506-i386-kde-CD-1

note: these distribution were all tested using a flash drive installation (except for debian 506 which does not believe in flash drive media).

Test Box Specification:

Emachine D730
I3 Processor
2G Ram
250G Drive
802.11/b/g/n
14'' LCD
DVD Drive
Kingston Flash Drive 4G

Test Subjects:

1.Installation
2.Hardware Detection
3.Look & Feel
4.Applications
5.Package Management

after almost two weeks of testing, the victorious Linux Distribution is Linux Mint 9 codename “Isadora”

I shall be posting all the actual review for the said machine, for the meantime I'm still savoring the new friendship with Isadora.