I just like the look and feel of Redhat, but I never use Redhat kernels. Always vanilla kernels from kernel.org, that's the best way to make EVERYTHING work just the right way.
And in regard to your HP, I bet your power management is not working properly. And if you have an internal wireless card inside of that HP, it most likely not work.

Screens, mouse pads, most sound boards, cd-roms, ethernet cards, USB, firewire, and floppy drives are now very standard, and are almost always detected just fine with almost any distro. It's the small details that drives people, like me, crazy if it is not supposed yet by the kernel.

Laptops are tricky because every laptop that each manufacturer makes, almost always comes with different manufacturer components, so some manufacturer hardware is well supported under Linux, and some other is not so well supported.
This is why you might have a new laptop, and everything seems to be supported, or sometimes have an older laptop, and seems to have few things that actually work.

Since laptops come with everything builtin, and brandname computers are always looking for the most cost effective hardware to put in there, an ethernet card that worked on under Linux just fine in a HP Version #1 laptop, may not work well in a HP Version #2 laptop, because now HP changed their ethernet card to a different manufacturer with cheaper ethernet card components.
And this makes it hard to always know for sure, which laptop will and will not work best with Linux.

zLinuxz

Does suspend and resume work well ?

Have you got a wireless lan card ?

That'd be crucial for me so I thought I'd ask

haven't tried suspend and resume, so I can't help you on that

and no, no wireless LAN card...

I should take some time for the suspend and resume, but I need that time for other things for the moment

I've got Mandrake 9.1 running on my IBM Thinkpad T40, everything works, but it took some twiddling. At first I needed a new kernel to support the AGP/IDE buses so I could have 3D acceleration and DMA, but after that, everything works perfectly. Even suspend/resume works from X with the DRI-Resume patch applied to the DRI modules. I've seen people get speedstep working on nearly identical laptops, but I haven't looked into that yet, as I don't really need even more battery life yet. I can eaisly go 4+ hours with the extra battery, but without the speedstep.

Great laptop, and IBM seems to at least pseudo-officially support Linux.

Although I never saw it running (I didn't had enough space) I saw the installer detected _everything_ ok on my and other's desktops. I am talking about Lycoris build 47.

!!!! Take care !!!! The licence is not quite free....

libranet and vector linux are the coolest and lightest ones. I started with redhat 9 but it was too slow. I switched over to vector which is very fast and is based on slackware

I had no end of problems trying to get my (older) netgear MA401 working on RH9.0 - it would see the card but not actually get it in a useable mode....

I eventually gave up, then had to install SUSE (8.x) for business use (company has a port for internal beta testing), this saw the card and allowed me to configure it in approx 2 minutes...

If you have a newer wireless card then RH9 is good for these - but the older (PRISMII) versions seem to be a right pain.

Oh - this is a Dell CSx - 3+ years old, and both SUSE and RH9 went on with no tinkering. Just had the wireless issues...

I installed Lindows OS on my Dell laptop and it works great. I think that it has to be the best Linux for laptops. It detected my ethernet card and my cd burner automaticly! I didn't have to install any drivers.
But if you are a power user, then you would have to tweek it a bit

since that post, i have installed slackware 9 on an HP pavilion ze5300. everything works, and is tweaked to the way i like it

cd burner works, dvd -rom works, truetype fonts installed, gtk2 libraries, xine works great, hackedbox windowmanager configured the way i like it, artwiz fonts installed, ms core fonts installed, apache2 web server configured and runs whenever/where ever.

all i have to do now is configure pcmcia and usb. since slack 9 hangs whenever, i will wait until the 2.6 kernel becomes stable, install it, then try to configure usb and pcmcia again (hopefully they will work)

guys, i was wondering if any of you have the same laptop as I do (toshiba a20 sp259). i need to install linux to do school work. i was thinking of suse because of samba?, that way i could access my xp partition for the mp3´s. its suse 8.2. I also have rehat 9 but no last i checked i could listen to mp3´s, who knows why. of course in the end i would have to choose which ever one worked best (with the least hardaware problems), regardless of wheater i can listen or not to my music.

any help would be greatly appreciated

If you are using a laptop with wireless extensions....

I must say that Mandrake 9.2 is great, it works fine with my laptop which is an IBM ThinkPad T40.
Just had some small troubles with the wireless extension.... but it was fixed pretty fast.

I tried SuSE 9.0 but neither the power management nor the wireless worked...

But my conclusion is:
Use any distribution you like! But if you want to have less fixing, choose Mandrake 9.2

Have fun!

I've tried Red Hat 9, Mandrake 9.2 and SuSe 9 (AND THIS ONE WILL STAY!)

The problem with Red Hat was that since my laptop is kinda new (HP ze4610us) the drivers for the screen/graphic card were not there.
I had to manually edit the XF86Config file (following suggestions on a linux-on-laptops page).
Then, since the kernel is so old (2.4.20-18) ACPI was not functional. Here, I followed an article on Linux User & Developer mag. that said to forget about ACPI if you had a kernel older than 2.4.22
I tried to compile a new kernel, but being the newbie I am, I could never get all the modules right, and the darned thing never rebooted with the new kernels that I tried with...

The I tried Mandrake 9.2, which has a newer kernel (2.4.22) and better drivers for the graphics card. But installing packages that had given me no problem with RH9 were a pain in Mandrake. Mozilla, Java SDK, they all gave me fits when installing and finally went in after long fights...

Today I tried SuSe, and it went in like a charm. ACPI was perfectly configured from the start (lower the brightness of the monitor when you unplug the AC adaptor, etc., etc.). It did not, however, install Mozilla and is giving me some trouble putting it in.

In general, I liked RH's gnome interface, but I can live with SuSe's KDE (although I still think is waaaay more complicated). I did not care much for Mandrake overall.

arsongt,

From your post it appears that you intend to set up a dual or multiboot machine. For RH or Fedora, go take a look at http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html . Use the rpm's and instructions on the linked site and you will be able to read your mp3's from the Windows ntfs partition. There are other distros that are set up to read ntfs by default but I have found the RH based distros useful with the precompiled rpm's that are usually available for the various other programs that I may want to add to my system. If and when I get better at compiling stuff I may have a different opinion but the standardization on rpm's will remain attractive.

I use Slackware on a Dell Laptop. (Inspiron 8200)
It required a bit of tinkering (recompiling kernel to support power management + set up XFree86 correctly)
but apart from that everything is fine.

Mandrake works great on my old Toshiba laptop, even sees the dock (when present) and the items installed on the dock. Power monitors work good as well.

I think it is funny when people say that Mandrake takes away your control and does everything for you. It is very easy to open the control on Mandrake. Even in the install you can simply "Hit F1 for more options" and enter "expert" to go through the install as an expert with a ton of extra options.

I think the kernel version is going to be more important than your distro of choice, I would just avoid distros that may take extra work like gentoo, etc. which are not as well supported by the masses. RPM-based distros are also good to stick with because you can always go to rpmfind.net if you find that there is a module or something that you need for your laptop.