Anyone Using Linux

[David P]

Wifi and Linux often don't happily coexist (from my tests, at least) - problems with cards and drivers and stuff - so that may particularly be an issue with a laptop...? Good luck.

[Ferg3333]

I run linux, Open Suse 10.3 and there is not much you cannot do. But there are some work arounds such as getting the right codecs for media playback and dvds, as these are not freeware, but there is libdvdcss which allows dvd playback etc

any problems give me a pm

[NeilB]

Linux on a laptop....aye.

I have tried .....

PC Linux
Ubuntu
Fedora
Red Hat Enterprise 3 + 4


Wifi seemed easier to make work under Fedora 8 (ndiswrapper with Windose drivers). I liked Ubuntu the best. PC Linux seems to have the most apps ready installed. RHEL was more of a training install - I am an RHCE.

As the software is free you have nothing to lose but a bit of time downloading and installing......if you find the right Linux magazine they often have a DVD with several versions on for free.

Give it a try......

[TDave]

Ubuntu has come a long way in the relatively few years its been out there for use, and, from my albeit limited trials, provides the best 'out of box' experience in terms of getting things working, thanks largely to the Proprietary Drivers tool.

Having said that, I really haven't spent much time playing with other new versions of distros in a good while - I just like the way Ubuntu (Debian-based) handles file installations and, for a desktop-user machine, the emphasis Mark Shuttleworth puts on 'pretty as a feature' is always nice.

I've been using Ubuntu on my laptops (Apple PowerBook G4 and IBM T41) for at least 3 years and have found it fine. It had niggles (although the latest upgrades were fine, and I expected trouble with the Apple) but the workarounds were usually never too far away, but there's not really a hotline to ring.

It _is_ different though. Not all your Windows programs will work straight out and probably won't install the same way. If you have difficulties though, just check the community documentation for whatever Distro you try or, failing that, Google's always good - [APPLICATION_NAME under Ubuntu_Version] - and see what it turns up.
Give it a good few days of seeing if it can do what you want to do before binning it. Things work differently to Windows (as you'd expect, a Mac behaves differently to Windows as well :-) ) but for something that isn't work-critical, as this sounds, its worth spending a while seeing if you can get used to it.

Enjoy it, let us know how you find it!

Some other distros I've heard good stuff about (from recent releases):
- SuSe
- Fedora
- Mandriva (I heard Hardware support on the free version is wobbly though)

There are many, many other choices out there, but for new-user friendliness, those are the ones that spring to mind.

Have fun!

[mikecsmith]

I used to dual boot my laptop with OpenSuSe 10.2 and Windows XP last year, Ubuntu is nice but at the time I couldn't get it to support all my hardware easily and OpenSuSe took the least configuring.

If you're going to install Linux, if you have issues getting more than 2 drivers working properly for components then my advice is to just switch to another distro rather than faffing around trying to fix it.

Oh and unless you feel reaaaallly brave, go for the x86 (32-bit) versions of Linux rather than the x64 versions as they're a pain in the arse to get working properly.

New Ubuntu is supposed to be really good btw.

[Matt-75]

No to Ubuntu. If you go down that road get Debian and not a Debian wannabe.

CentOS 5.1 is where its at. Basically a free version of RHEL. I run it on an old Inspiron 4000, 2 desktop machines and a server. Its incredibly easy to use, and unlike Fedora doesnt go out of date every year.

www.centos.org - The Community ENTerprise Operating System

[Colin Marriott]

Where I work, they use CentOS.

At home, I use PCLinuxOS, that's what the server in my signature is running.



ColinM