hi,

I am newbie to linux. I bought Dell Inspiron 600m four months back and I have been using WindowXP. I wanted to install linux on my laptop as a dual OS. I browsed the net to find which kind of Linux to install and I am really confused .

Can anyone pls suggest me a linux which is easy to install.

System config:
Dell Inspiron 600m,
1.7 GHz, 512MB RAM.

Thanks a lot in advance .

I have personally installed Mandriva 2006 (free download version) on a couple of these laptops without a problem. Others will suggest distros like Fedora, Slackware, Gentoo, etc. While I can't speak for some of them (I haven't used Slackware in 7 years), I personally only recommend Mandriva, as it is the only Linux distro certified by Intel for centrino based systems and desktop use.The others have their own strengths, but for ease of use and installation, Mandriva is much further along.

I even had my mother try to install it on my IBM Thinkpad without any assistance, and her only issue was she couldn't find Internet Explorer after installing (I introduced her to Firefox).

If you want to test out your system to get an idea what will and won't work, try downloading and running Knoppix. It is a live distribution that will run entirely from CD (won't touch the harddrive unless you tell it to). It will give you an idea which components may or may not work with some portions of your system (wireless, for example).

Mandriva will run with most wireless network cards that run under windows. It does this by using a wrapper driver that installs and executes the windows driver. It comes with the free edition (along with the powerpack edition), and is easy to configure.

Good luck, and keep us informed of your installation efforts!

I have a Dell 600M and I run Suse 10.0 on it. All of the hardware was found on install, including the wireless.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux - Distributions and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Thankx a lot GrueMaster and blahpony for ur valuable opinions. I have googled and searched for both mandriva and suse, found tat suse 10 is v.good for newbies like me, so I am going to install suse 10. I will get back to u once it is done.

thankx a lot guys,
never expected such good replies.

hello LinuxGurus,

I have installend suse 10 on my laptop. The good part is my wireless card is detected but I am unable to connect to the net, because I could not establish any network connection. I switched back to Windows XP (dual boot) and checked the wireless, its working fine!

Can anyone pls guide me in this regard?

Thankx a lot.

Sorry for the lack of response, my internet connection was down (qwest clamed that my dsl modem smoking was caused by my use of Linux - sheesh).

I wish I could help, but all my (limited) wireless experience has been with Mandriva 2006. I am checking out OpenSuse 10.1 at work, and it has come a long way since 9.3. I still prefer Mandriva, because once urpmi is configured with a little help from http://easyurpmi.zarb.org, dependency issues almost becomes non-existant. Not sure what other distro's have available (I know debian has repositories, just haven't used them).

Thankx a lot for all ur responses. I have been using suse 10 for over a week and its great. For a newbie like me it made it easy to convert from windows to linux, not entirely ofcourse, but its a beginning.

I know you have choosen suse 10.0. I love suse, I use it on my amd 64 machines.
My dell 600m I use for work is running ubuntu 5.04 very well if you are looking to try out new distros. (dual boot)
Suse roks but it does not have the best package manager.
I am a huge fan of Ubuntu's apt-get (Debian I know)
My .02

I haven't upgraded to the new 5.10 Ubuntu because I haven't had the time or desire.

Blair