hey, I am going to JWU for a BS in network engineering, and I recently bought a touchscreen laptop for college. I plan to put EVERYTHING on it. I even have a 500GB external for it to back up everything and store useless data. I got a touch screen so I can put math notes and stuff on it.
But now for my question: I want to have linux on here because its a good networking platform due to its fleblility and all the tools made for it. At first I got suns Virtualbox and tried to load different opperating systems on it with various results. Most of the results werent good ones. so now i am thinking about dual booting Ubuntu, because its a good stable platform, which I have used many times. But I need to know if it is compatable with everything I have on my laptop. my laptop is a HP Touchsmart tx2. You can look up the specs online. Its the one with 500GB's of HDD and 4GB's of ram and a 64-bit operating system.
These however, are what I am most interested in using:
Wireless card - integrated: Broadcom 4321AG 802.11a/b/g/draft-n Wi-Fi adapter

Video card integrated (blech): ATI Radeon 3200

and the various touchscreen devices, such as the n-trig HID interface digitizers. Are there linux versions?

Thanks

I think the best thing you can do, is boot up with the Ubuntu CD and see what works and what doesn't, that's be beauty of Ubuntu, its installation CD is also a LiveCD, which means you can try it out, before you mess with your hard drive.

Good Luck

yes, but ocasionally there are other drivers and third party software that might help me that i dont know about.

Might as well see what works, then research what doesn't, and take it from there

Im just going to install it. I found a few forums on ubuntu about tx2 models and gettting the touchscreen to work.
Hey vista is good for something afterall. I just used its shrink feature to shrink my C drive down to 353 GB's and loose up 100GB for a new partition for linux

If your lookin to try the Ubuntu with most of your newer videoe drivers etc lready installed
get Ultimate edition 2.2 (ubuntu 9.04) DVD
it was trying to install my nvidia drivers as soon as the desktop opened

Not only does it have like everything
it also plays 3d games like windows
or at least better than any other distro I've used

( http://ultimateedition.info/ultimate-edition-2-2/ )

I am going to install an older version of ubuntu that i have on 64-bit CD then I will use that to just upgrade to the latest one. Will I get an option between the different versions of Ubuntu?

well Ubuntu refused to detect any of my internet adapters, so I guess I need to do it the manual way of downloading it on my main computer and transfering it to my other computer via flash drive.

oh linus thanks for refering me to Ultimate edition. Currently I want an OS I am more familiar with, but I will be sure to use this in the future.