Without any reservation the distro you are looking for is Arch Linux. <br><br><a href="http://www.archlinux.org/">http://www.archlinux.org/</a><br><br>For reasons why read these:<br><br><a href="http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_vs_Others">http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_vs_Others</a><br>
<a href="http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way">http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way</a><br><br>You're coming up with the same sort of wish list I had when I first found it - I'm pretty broadly experienced with distributions - between work and personal interest I stay current with Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, SuSe, Foresight , Gentoo and gNewSense (not to mention OpenSolaris, OpenBSD and FreeBSD). I experience and appreciate the strenghts of all these systems, but I always choose Arch for my day to day machines. Though I can't condone using non-free software you'll find it there for installtion in the standard repositories and you'll be watching BBC iPlayer or whatever else you want to do.<br>
<br>More important for me is that if something isn't in the core, extra or community repository it may well be available in the AUR (Arch User Repository) :<br><br><a href="http://aur.archlinux.org/index.php">http://aur.archlinux.org/index.php</a><br>
<br>... and if it isn't there making a new package from source is trivial (I mean really trivial) and can be learned by reading a single wiki page (or the man page) which probably amounts to a side and a half of A4s worth of text. ...and when you're done you can submit your package back to the AUR - and if people like it and trust it then it can get voted into the supported community repository.<br>
-- <br>Geoff Teale<br><<a href="mailto:tealeg@member.fsf.org">tealeg@member.fsf.org</a>>