Recommend a Linux distro formy laptop

T

Tim Murray

the Windom Earle of mobile SOCs
Veteran
Kinda need a Linux box for later classes, so I figure I could set it up on my laptop. But I have a soft spot for Slackware, and that seems like a Really Bad Idea on a laptop. So... suggestions?
 
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora Core. All three have pretty great hardware detection which will make things a lot less painful for you in the beginning, presuming the laptop's not massively cutting edge.

Anything Centrino-based will be fine, really, and those three distros are easy to use to boot. Community support pretty much rocks for them too, so getting help should be easy.
 
I've got a 9200, though, which kinda unnerves me (reading about ATI Linux drivers), but considering I don't need 3D at all... I'm not too worried.

Ubuntu I've played with before, so I'll probably either go with that or Kubuntu (Gnome or KDE... hmmm.).

edit: so I'm sitting in class, and somebody just said they're giving out Ubuntu CDs in the university center. I :love: CMU. (the class is data structures, surprise surprise)
 
The Baron said:
Kinda need a Linux box for later classes, so I figure I could set it up on my laptop. But I have a soft spot for Slackware, and that seems like a Really Bad Idea on a laptop. So... suggestions?
Click to expand...

I might be a little biased, but go with Mandriva it is a lot better than the Fedora Project and it offers both gnome and KDE plus other interfaces...
It's hardware detection is great as well.
 
hupfinsgack said:
I might be a little biased, but go with Mandriva it is a lot better than the Fedora Project and it offers both gnome and KDE plus other interfaces...
It's hardware detection is great as well.
Click to expand...

urm...Mandriva 2006 is just around corner....
you might wanna check this :

http://www.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org

as far as i know from reviews it pretty good and final product should be out soon....



The openSUSE project is a worldwide community program sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com) that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. The program provides anyone with free and easy access to the world's most usable Linux distribution, SUSE Linux.

Here at openSUSE.org, you'll find a community of developers, end users and other open source enthusiasts who all have the same goal in mind. We work together to create and distribute the world's most usable Linux. There are many ways you can participate in the openSUSE project first you should get a copy of SUSE Linux and install it on your machine.
Click to expand...
 
I really don't like Red Hat/Fedora. It's pretty hard to get things as you want them on those. It's all pretty non-standard, and not very well integrated. Suse and variants are ok, but I really like Debian and derivatives best. Especially maintainging those and installing/updating stuff is a breeze, with apt (and the new managers, if you like that). They actually put in a lot of hard work to get everything working together seamlessly. And it has the most active development community. Knoppix is an easy way to try it, and allows you to install it to the harddisk while running the GUI.
 
I have gentoo running on my 12" ibook, and even with the shortage of stuff that makes it to the ppc architechure, I've had a fully functional laptop for a while. Emerge, the app distrobution program, is really configurable and IMO as good as app-get (Debian). The only downside is you have to compile everything, but most stuff onlt takes a minute or less (long compiles I've had: firefox, openoffice, X) and I there's always a binary option. Some stuff to be careful of:
* Wireless support
* Vid card support, if you want hw-accelerated media, but you seem to be decided in that arena anyway (and yes, ATI in linux is a bitch, you have to hack up your xorg.conf, and even then ATI's current offerings still get wasted by nvidia'a last gen)
* 64-bit, but it seems to be getting better everyday. Flash comes to mind. You can always do a 64bit-native environment with a 32-bit chroot, or just 32bit-native running under emulation.

I've also had gentoo on my A64 box at home for a while, and I'm nothing short of impressed by it.

EDIT: Oops, just read you were going centrino anyway. You'll have full compatability, im sure of it.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
as for major distros... iam sure both Mandriva and SuSe will support prolly all hardware out there...

and TBH i really liked SuSe's Yast .....
 
YaST is the best system admin tool for a linux box to date. I haven't seen better.

I suggest dling the free ISOs for SUSE 9.3 -- don't bother futzing with 10 just yet. You can setup some extra YaST sources and then get the stuff that might be missing from those, otherwise it's great. I'm using 9.2 right now and even that's been nothing but awesome.

if you want support, I suggest waiting till 10.0 and buying it.

As for DEs, I'm guessing you'll end up being a big KDE fan, network transparency is very cool and you'll likely spooge over things like fish:/. Add to the fact that you can setup keyboard shortcuts for every last thing -- a must for laptops and their worthless pointer devices.
 
openSuSe is same, if not advanced then retail Novell Suse.....
and itis RC1... which means it is very close to finish line.... if u have good bradband and flatrate... try it, i dont thin you will regrat it....

both Mandriva 2006 and SuSe 10 are coming next month.... thats really not too long to wait...
 
The best out there for a laptop, in my opinion, is Ubuntu. Everything just works (acpi, speedstep, wlan, video...). Plus, debian package manager is far better than those based on rpm.

Suse is nice and all, but xine is broken (you have to recompile it to have some mp3 and dvd support), and multimedia wise is a bit lacking. I had some problems in 9.3 with the ipw2000 module (not being installed by default).

Gentoo is also very nice, in fact, the nicest if you need a 64 bit environment. Suse and ubuntu are a pain in the ass (you have to recompile almost all 32bits packages due to strange lib location). Instead of using /usr/lib for 32 bits apps (maintaining compatibility) they use /usr/lib32, so all the binary packages crashes when trying to load the libraries they need.

Talking about ati drivers, thery are not difficult to install. Just change the driver to fglrx (once it is installed) and make sure you have the kernel module (or say bye bye to dri and hardware accelerated open gl). There are some sites that makes deb packages ready to install (with kernel module included if it matches your current kernel).

So my adivce, go for ubuntu (or kubuntu if you like that nasty kde desktop).

Sorry for my funky english XD
 
Suse is nice and all, but xine is broken (you have to recompile it to have some mp3 and dvd support), and multimedia wise is a bit lacking. I had some problems in 9.3 with the ipw2000 module (not being installed by default).
Click to expand...

No you don't have to recompile anything, merely add a third party YaST source and you can update xine, end of story.
 
Ubuntu. It has great laptop support. ACPI, Wireless, clock speed ramping, etc. None of the others do all of that. Fedora does not for sure (I tried it on my Inspiron 9300). Ubuntu is the only way to go IMO for Linux on laptops.

Watch out though. If you need WPA on your wireless it's going to get quite complicated. I'm very disappointed still at the level of support for techs that are even a few years old. Linux is never going to penetrate into a mass market in its current form. Get ready to spend HOURS messing with the command line if you need to install hardware :)
 
Saem said:
No you don't have to recompile anything, merely add a third party YaST source and you can update xine, end of story.
Click to expand...

That didn't work for me in suse 9.3 (64 bits), and was far worse in 10 beta.
 
Could be. I tried to install xinelib from other source (guru rpm? don't remember) and it gave a hell of dependency errors. At the end it was easier for me to download the tar.gz and compile it by hand. Same thing happened with mad plugin for xine and gstreamer. Xine (with de default lib) crashes very badly and gstreamer refuses to work (this is in 10 beta). But anyway, the lack of multimedia support out of the box is quite annoying (imagine somebody without an internet connection).

Now i'm happily living between my gentoo amd64 box and the p4 ubuntu server. One is FAST, and the other just works.
 


SUSE Linux 10.0 RC1 (Codename "Nürnberg")


  • KDE default installation needs manual addition of "amarok-xine" package to solve dependencies.
[edit]
SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta 4 (Codename "Provo")


[edit]
Call for testing


  • We ask you to test all the PCMCIA and Cardbus-cards you have with beta4. We expect everything to work :) but a broader test is appreciated. Thanks in advance for a lot of helpful bugreports.



[edit]
SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta 3 (Codename "Bangalore")


  • A GNOME installation cannot resolve all software dependencies, go into "Software" and add one of the two packages offered (either kdebase3-SuSE or apache2).
. /etc/profile.d/lang.sh
Wrong firmware-loader script called by udev causing ipw2100/ipw2200 load failures. Bug #112915
Click to expand...


i think some of the issues you had with SuSe beta have been ironed ;)
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=112915
 
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