Getting a laptop and needing little help.
 

Okay,

I'm planning on getting a new laptop from Asus. Model A6JC to be more precise.

My problem is that I've never had a laptop so this is kinda new to me.
Is there anything special I should take in consideration when installing linux on it? I'm planning to put it on dual-boot. So I need probably resize the ntfs-partition.


Then, which distro should I use? Is any distro more capable than other on a laptop? One point is that my laptop is going to be offline for few months before I can get my own DSL connection so which distro offers support for the following out of box:

-Mp3 and flac support
-Quanta for making webpages
-SQL databases (postgresSQL or MySQL)to test those
-KDevelop or similar
-KDE
-Video codecs and a player
-Good support for A6JC's hardware
-DVD/CD-burning tools

I don't think the hardware would be an issue.
If you're bad you have an ATI graphics card (but even then, it should be recognized). Other issues sometimes being problematic with Linux - as WinModems or some printers, etc. - don't seem to apply to you (hopefully).

Apart from I haven't heard about flac yet, your software needs should be accomplished by SUSE Linux 10.x "Evaluation Version", which comes on 5 CDs. Note that this "evaluation version" (that should come with the codecs you need) will never expire.

Just my 2 cents; HTH

Okay, I have a lot of distros burned to CDs / DVDs, shall see what I end up using. I've had problems with Mandriva as it will not detect my chipset (nForce4) and freezes during installation. That's why I asked about the distro. I probably end up using one of the following: Kubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware, SuSE.
Not sure about Debian as it needs little "debianish" experience to get it working. I've spend 4 hours on it to get my nvidia drivers on it but it just wouldn't work and my dist-upgrade ended up breaking whole system :)

Hopefully I get my laptop before I leave so I can use it at home and download the necessery updates and druvers etc.

Here's a guide on how to burn Ubuntu CD images, containing links to Breezy 5.10 (not Dapper 6.06 yet) .torrent files (including the multiverse and universe repositories). You can always switch to Kubuntu from there by installing the kubuntu-desktop package.

My! These are completely different Linux distros! - Only SuSE is natively prepared to have everything on CDs / a DVD.

Kubuntu has good hw detection and is quite nice to use. SuSE comes with sh*t load of stuff so that would be a solid choice.

It seems I get my laptop next week so I have two weeks to prepare it. I think I'll install the gentoo and update it to the latest version and get all the necessary applications and all to it. I have most experience using slackware / gentoo so it would seem logical choice. Also I learn a lot more of linux using them than some ubuntu or SuSE.