So far, the only Linux distribution I have been able to load on my Sony Vaio has been SuSE Linux because it is the only one that can handle a Firewire DVD drive. As far as I know, this may still be true.
SuSE Linux, now owned by Novell, does not hold back with what it delivers. There are five CD-Roms and two double-sided DVD-Roms, one of which contains the 64-bit edition for AMD's latest generation of high-performance chips. Sadly, I was unable to test this.
Installing the operating system was not a problem. It all went well but my biggest problem was trying to get the wireless connection to work. To begin a long and horrible story, finding help is a nightmare. SuSE has a webpage, but any attempt to find something to do with 'Wi-fi', 'wireless' or 'WLAN' or even '802.11' seems doomed to fail. The YaST2 (yet another Setup Tool 2) application is normally not too bad, but for wireless it is simply not connected.
I finally found a client driver for kWiFiManager. After being prompted to insert four of the five CD-Roms that came with the installation, it asked me for a disc from SuSE 8.2. I think somebody needs to get their act together.
Apart from the fun-and-games with CD-Roms, everything else worked well. Heaps of bundled software is what one has come to expect from Linux distributions; package after package of open source and other software. So much, in fact, that you may be hard pressed to work out what half of it does.
The new KDE interface was sharp and Ethernet access was completely automatic. Why can't the wireless connection be the same? SuSE provides you with such a dizzying array of software, you may not know where to begin. Apart from the usual OpenOffice suite, GIMP photo editing package, TeX and gcc for software development, Java tools, and a great deal more, SuSE now offers you Scribus 1.1.6 - a desktop publishing application. There is also a database front-end, Rekall, that can work with MySQL, PostreSQL and others.