Hello all!

I just got a hand-me-down laptop for my dad.

Specs:
K6-III 550Mhz
256MB SDRAM
6GB Hard Drive
CD-ROM
Floppy
Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA 802.11b


Last night I put Fedora Core 2 on it but there are a host of problems. The main problem is that the computer freezes A LOT! It usually freezes about every 5 minutes and then i have to hold the power button to restart it. Even with Windows ME (what an unstable OS) it didn't do this. I have know idea how one would go about fixing this.

I think it might be good to switch to a different linux distro. I plan to use this computer for word processing, web browsing, instant messaging, a little music a perhaps a bit of *cough* wardriving *cough*. Although I'm very familiar with computers in general (I'm an overclocker) I know very little about linux. I'd like a linux distribution that is easy to use but powerful enough that I'd keep it for a while, stable, and works well with my wireless card and wireless networks in general.

should I try to stick with Fedora or move on? If a different distro, which one should i use?

just remember, I'm a

does anybody know anything about the wireless options in Suse?

Try DSL linux http://linux.about.com/b/a/061513.htm or
knoppix http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=44

size isn't really much of an option. all I need is about 2GB of hard drive space to work with. I don't plan on bringing many big files on board. Fedora was like 2.5 and I"m fine witht that. any other suggestions?

I am running SuSE on my laptop (Dell Latitude C640, P4, 256MB RAM, 20GB HD). I have limited experience with Linux, even more limited with distros other than SuSE, but it seems like SuSE has good "out of the box" wireless support. My Cisco 350 card works without doing anything special, but it doesn't work with something like Knoppix (without extra work). SuSE recognizes my USB mouse when I hook it up and it shows a nice little tray icon for power level of the battery. I know this may seem trivial to a lot of power users, but I like the features since I am fairly new to linux.

On a side note about the wardriving: I am highly interested in security related linux tools and I am having a hard time getting some of those tools to work with SuSE 9.0 because of dependencies on newer modules than what is installed by running YOU. A lot of the packages I would like to use are also not included in their package list, so you have to install from source. Something like Debian may have a lot more of the packages you are looking for that would be easy to install....but I'm still playing with getting Debian installed on my laptop.....

thank you very much i think I might try out suse. what version do you have? 9.0?

As for wardriving, I don't really care all that much because I don't have a card that's compatible with airsnort yet so I'll probably just wait a while to get the card in order to get a little more familiar with linux.

Thanks!

I am currently using SuSE 9.0 Pro, my copy of SuSE 9.1 Pro should be on the way (waiting for it to arrive). I have used the 9.1 Live CD and I liked it enough to buy a copy of 9.1 Pro so that I could get all the features and packages. You could always download the Live CD like I did and try it out...

what are all the differences between 9.0 and 9.1?

Look and feel is very similar. 9.1 uses the 2.6 kernel instead of 2.4 and it uses KDE 3.2. SuSE 9.1 also has OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 which I *think* is supposed to have some improvements in how it handles MS format files. That's the big ones I know of, I haven't looked into it much.

nevermind I'm happy right now considering I'm posting on the linux laptop in Firefox 0.9

a quick note when it comes to wireless with SuSE 9.1, if your card is not imediatly reconized try running YAST Online Update as there are something like 4-5 drives for different WLan cards that to my best guess are not open source. These seem to be similar to the Nvidia drivers, they don't package them with the cds becaouse SuSE wants to make sure that you understand that these drivers have their own liscence that you need to agree to.

FWIW, I've been running SuSE 8.1 on an old IBM Thinkpad 600e (PII/366) for some time now. It's extremely stable and reliable, reasonably fast, and everything is supported except a couple of the power-saving options (I imagine that SuSE 9.x would be better in that department).

I'm running 9.1 on my Toshiba and I have a few irritating issues with it. I'm dual booting with XP and was thinking about having my laptop Linux only so I may give Suse another try or move to Mandrake.

Yast package management/install..etc. It doesn't work, no error messages or nothing, just simply doesn't work. Will start to load, the app window will flash but then nothing.

Other than that 9.1 is a great distro, probably my favorite so far but this issue REALLY bugs me, I hate installing software in Linux so Yast is one of the reasons I chose Suse. I tried Debian and clones in the past and I love apt but trying to find the packages later sucks, and something will inevidabley stop working after another dependency gets updated.

I cannot speak for other distro's... But I am a slackware guy, I use slackware on my desktop's and will never use another OS on my desktops...

However for my laptop use I need something that works pretty easily.. Usually when I need to use my laptop on the road, I dont have time to fiddle with anything I need up going into what I need and out and have the thing powered back down as quickly as possible. Now I could have this setup with slackware, but I chose Mandrake 10CE. I have to say Mandrake will be my laptop distro from now on. Simple setup with everything I need was 1.6GB, it is switft to boot-up and I have yet to have to tinker with anything except ndiswrapper. But since I have got that up and going I have had 0 problems with it.

I cannot speak for SuSE, but I hope to try 9.1 in the future. I am very happy with the way novell is pushing linux (SuSE in particular). SuSE might be a distro that I will actually pay for in the future. but I think SuSE and Mandrake would be a solid choice for a (somewhat modern) laptop distro.

btw, I have an HP OmniBook 500, it is a PIII 600, w/ a 10GB drive and 256 MB of ram. It has actually transitioned into my prrimary machine for shcool work