i suspect the overwhelming majority will be saying some ubuntu derivative.
my current favourite is the daddy debian. followed by fedora.
In essence you probably want a distro with a kernel that is either 2.6.25 or preferably 2.6.26 to give your hardware a chance of being automatically detected. And that is really the key thing.
Hi, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu.
Linux Mint may be a good place to start, as whatever works for normal Ubuntu should work for Mint. Mint also has some codecs and the like preinstalled, so it is pretty much ready to go out of the box.
However, I've had a couple of issues with Linux Mint, everyone ranted and raved about how good it was. My personal experience wasn't great, and so I went back to plain old Ubuntu.
So I don't think you can go wrong with Mint or normal Ubuntu.
If you have any other questions don't be scared to ask!
i dunno if its just me but 80% of the fun in any linux distro is that its not easy and allows you to learn, i love makin things work more than being spoonfed