What model Dell laptop?

Colonel Panic wrote:What model Dell laptop?

I don't have it in front of me to get the exact model - it's an Inspiron 15xx. About a year old.

Well if you know the model number you can look up its exact specs on the Dell website, then go to the Ubuntu Forums and ask there.

It's a great community. There are many knowledgeable people there who are always eager to help.

Kubuntu seems to be a little easier to use, depending upon who you ask. A lot of it really depends upon what you want to do with the laptop in the first place...for websurfing, e-mail, etc., pretty much anything will do. For more specific applications (audio recording, etc.) you will want to do a little more research...

barndog wrote:What's the best distro these days for laptops? At some point, I want to make my Dell Inspiron laptop a linux machine - just wondering what flavor has the best updated device drivers etc.

Ubuntu? Anybody done this?

The newest Ubuntu 7.10 has been working well on laptops from what I have read, since there is better wifi and suspend/hibernate support.

Thanks for all the responses. I'm gonna give this a shot after I wrap up a few projects - I'll let you know how it goes.

rayj wrote:Kubuntu seems to be a little easier to use, depending upon who you ask. A lot of it really depends upon what you want to do with the laptop in the first place...for websurfing, e-mail, etc., pretty much anything will do. For more specific applications (audio recording, etc.) you will want to do a little more research...

I actually like the KDE more than Gnome. It has more features to customize and configure, but I think the look & feel is better and it seems to be a bit more intuitive for me.

But yeah barndog if you care to post the model number of your laptop I'd be glad to check and make sure it'll be compatible. Ubuntu/Kubuntu hardware support is pretty good and most later Dells ought to work just fine.

Colonel Panic wrote:But yeah barndog if you care to post the model number of your laptop I'd be glad to check and make sure it'll be compatible. Ubuntu/Kubuntu hardware support is pretty good and most later Dells ought to work just fine.

That's mighty nice of you, Colonel. It's a Dell Inspiron 6000. No hurry, I don't plan on actually doing this for another month.

Damn, VMWare Appliances are fucking awesome, i.e. prebuilt VM instances:

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/marketplace.html

Fedora 7 seems just fine running as a VM on a Macbook Pro. Red Hat Enterprise Server 4.6 was a little tougher, yet just as cool. I'm way stoked. Fuck Parallels. IMHO, a Windows XP vm SEEMS to run much faster in Fusion than in Parallels.

Now to only get the "Windows" only version of Eclipse from a vendor I deal with to work with a non windows install of Ecplise. Sweet!!!!

Bloody shit, I b0rked the linux on my lappy.

Last night, I installed a bunch of apps mainly associated with video editing. Dunno what happened but now Linux hangs during boot-up, before it gets to opening X-windows. I can boot to a console, so all is not lost, but I fear that I'm gonna have a long night of command-line wranglings ahead of me before this issue is resolved.

Word of advice, talk to knowledgeable people on the Interwebs before installing packages all willy-nilly.