I have a Toshiba Portege m205-s810 that I would like to use as a diagnostic and security testing platform. I was looking into using pentoo but it didn't look like it was very well supported. I may be wrong. I prefer something with a gnome environment because I'm just not a fan of doing all my work from the command line. I like keeping things visibly organized in a desktop environment. On my desktop I currently use Ubuntu and while I have found it to be a great choice for my wife and I to use for daily work, it is just too much crap I don't need for my laptop to do what I want it do. So anyone have any suggestions as to well supported distros for diagnostics and security that I can install to the hard drive and that I can use gnome or kde with.

My suggestions is if you want a distro that is customizable to your needs then go with Gentoo Linux http://www.gentoo.org/ With this distro you can install just what you want with its dependencies. http://linuxdynasty.org Where IT pros come and share their knowledge..\

Backtrack is the right distribution for ya. "BackTrack is the most Top rated linux live distribution focused on penetration testing" http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html