I know I've been a Linux geek for quite some time. The only reasons I haven't switched are that Xsane is incompatible with my scanner (epson 4490) and there isn't any support for my connexant based modem.
But if you're looking for a small yet quite surprising distro, you could try TMXXINE in either the
Prism version (315mb) or the smaller
Shard version (155mb)They are both based on the
Puppy Linux codebase (read super optimized and small) and are so full packed with software that you wonder how they managed to squeeze it all in! It comes with Gimp, GTKam, Scribus, Xara Extreme, Open Office (full), and tons of other stuff. It's now based on the Puppy 3 distro. I've had display problems with Puppy3 but the previous versions work like a charm. It's a quite popular distro, you can check their
community pageThe fun thing about this distro is that it's a self booting disk and it's designed to be installed on just about anything. I've run TMXXINE from a 1gb usb key without any problems! It is blazing fast since it can run almost entirely from a ramdrive. My Athlon64 3700+ seems to run apps about 10x faster than with WindowsXP. Install on the key, plug it in, press the key to access the boot menu (esc on my hp), select USB and away it goes
I checked the
Sane Project website and your scanner is supported.
The main issues with Linux right now are with color profiling (which is nearly innexistant). But you could probably work around it by doing some testing.
But if you want to stay with Windows as a base, The Gimp is available for it. And for monitor calibration, QuickMonitorGamma is quite good.
Then, there's always the big Kubuntu which has a nice monitor calibration panel (better than the one on Ubuntu).
But still my choice for graphics and multimedia work goes to TMXXINE... It's so packed you don't even need to use their packages!