Well, speaking from personal experience and the immense amount of trouble I went through to get any version of Linux up and running, I would recommend MEPIS - http://www.mepis.org
It's up to date and detects modern hardware (including my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro + 3D acceleration). You can try it out first (although the 'live' version won't spot the ATI card) and if you decide to install it it includes everything you need to get BlitzMax up and running straight from the CD. Not one single package required updating from the net either. The partitioning didn't seem that intuitive, but it's easy enough when installing to an empty hard drive.
Just for the record, I've tried the following other distros...
SuSE 9.2 Personal - nice, but I simply could not get the thing to use the 3D capabilities of my 9800 Pro. Had to download lots of RPM's to get BM running.
Ubuntu - downloaded ISO's would not work and always complained of CRC errors. ShipIt CD's would not load the installation components.
SuSE 9.3 Pro - only got as far as the install menu and then didn't want to do anything else. Thought this was weird considering 9.2 was OK.
Linspire - full of promise, but failed to install with a fatal CD error barely into the installation process. Apparently this is due to the version of Grub used and their suggestion was to use another PC until they got around to updating it!
Anyway, MEPIS for me.
It's up to date and detects modern hardware (including my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro + 3D acceleration). You can try it out first (although the 'live' version won't spot the ATI card) and if you decide to install it it includes everything you need to get BlitzMax up and running straight from the CD. Not one single package required updating from the net either. The partitioning didn't seem that intuitive, but it's easy enough when installing to an empty hard drive.
Just for the record, I've tried the following other distros...
SuSE 9.2 Personal - nice, but I simply could not get the thing to use the 3D capabilities of my 9800 Pro. Had to download lots of RPM's to get BM running.
Ubuntu - downloaded ISO's would not work and always complained of CRC errors. ShipIt CD's would not load the installation components.
SuSE 9.3 Pro - only got as far as the install menu and then didn't want to do anything else. Thought this was weird considering 9.2 was OK.
Linspire - full of promise, but failed to install with a fatal CD error barely into the installation process. Apparently this is due to the version of Grub used and their suggestion was to use another PC until they got around to updating it!
Anyway, MEPIS for me.