What Arm do you plan on running?

I won't be getting a RasPi from the first batch, so I'm going to read the comments from RasPi pioneers at raspberrypi.org and here to see what problems there might be with the various distros.  The current information is that Fedora is intended for new GNU/Linux users who want to be sheltered from OS details and Fedora will the be the OS for the education-oriented launch later this year.  Debian is better suited for serious developers.  Arch is smaller and uses less memory, but requires more GNU/Linux knowledge.

Personally, I expect I'll be going with Debian, about which I've always heard good things.  I need gcc from day one, which is not included by default in Fedora.  Supposedly it's easy to download packages for any of the distros, especially the first two.  I don't see any point in downloading anything until I have a firm ship date for my RasPi.

I personally have moved from slackware, to suse, to redhat, to debian to ubuntu.

What I like about debian/ubuntu is that with "apt-get install XXX" you get to download/install a package. Easy. I hear this is now also possible with redhat/fedora, except that the program is called "yum".

Other than that, they should be somewhat similar. If you WANT you can dive in and change low-level stuff. If you don't you can stick with using the programs offered.

As my interest in the Raspberry Pi is purely intended for use as a Mediacentre, I was planning on going for the Raspbmc distribution being developed at the moment.

http://www.raspbmc.com/

I'll try them all, since none of them are my distro of choice which is Gentoo, and Gentoo is probably inappropriate for Rpi because compiling everything from scratch natively would take so long on the Pi's weak CPU.  Also, the continuous rewriting of storage that source-based distros like Gentoo perform acts against SDcard longevity, as well as taking up a lot of space.  I could cross-build Gentoo for the Rpi, but native use is probably not viable.

One distro that seems very suitable for Rpi is the minimalist Puppy Linux, so I'll keep an eye open on progress there as well.

this earlier post may be helpful:

http://www.element14.com/community/thread/17582?tstart=90

You wrote:

> Neither Debian nor Fedora has GPU accelerated X Window drivers,

> and neither is built specifically for the v6 ARM11 architecture.

Has anything been mentioned on the blog or elsewhere about a distro with X acceleration and also compiled for the Pi's specific architecture?

Apparently, nobody is working on X acceleration, and one guy is working on

compiling Debian for ARM 11.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/projects-and-collaboration-general/debian-hard-float-armhf-for-rpi

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/general-discussion/so-whos-workingworked-on-an-xorg-server

Yeah, something like puppy linux or even DSL would be great for the Raspberry pi. I remember running DSL entirelly in RAM on a pentium4 machine with 500MB RAM. It made my Core2Duo with 4GB RAM look slow

I still have a working P2 with 32MB and a couple of P3's with 64MB running firewalls, and Linux loves them (various distros).  It really doesn't need much RAM to be perfectly happy.