I hear what you're saying, but I'm not to inclined to dig around in my school laptop, particularly during finals week. :0
I'm overseas at school at the moment, but when I get back to the States I'll try Puppy out on my desktop (though my DSL connection might be an issue), though, er... I can always install a fatter distro on that. But at any rate, I really wanted to install it on a USB stick (my USB flash wrist watch actually -- oh yeah, that's geeky), but it turns out this POS BIOS doesn't actually support booting from "USB Stick," though it lists as much in the Boot Priority list.
I don't suppose there are any other small distros that let you save settings and data to your boot disk?
Perhaps you can determine a pattern here in terms of kernel versions:
Slax = ethernet controller not detected, no sound, no USB mouse
Puppy = Same
ZenLive = no problems at all
... need to try some more; perhaps PCLinuxOS "Minime"
Find one that works with every distro and you restore your own freedom of choice, not what some greedy capitalist NIC manufacturer and his puppeteer wants to force upon you
Yeah, but I suppose at least some of the "blame" has to be put on all the variation in these distros. It would seem to this noob that there should be some cross-distro standardization in terms of hardware support...add individual bells and whistles on top of a core functionality... ...perhaps some standards entity that issues some sort compliance certification.