best linux for New Dell 6000d laptop?
 

I have a new dell 6000d laptop with

p4 1.6
512ddr
128mb ati pci express video
6gb linux partition available

tried mepis but it seems to crash during first load, never getting into actual program.

what is a good distro that might work best with my dell?

thanks, m

Mepis is a good distro and you can actually troubleshoot why and how the crash happened. May be there's some tweaking you need to make it work. However, If you want to check out other distros...there are plenty.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora Core 4, Slackware (my personal favorite), Arch Linux...almost forgot SuSE.

You pick...they all work pretty well. Not to mention, you first need to figure out what possible uses you would employ the system for.

Tux,

Edit: Best way to figure out if all your hardware is recognized is to run a live-cd. Knoppix is an excellent (and almost de facto) live-cd distro.

Hard to define one particular distro that would be perfect for your laptop. I would say that distro doesn't matter, the most important [as you probably know] is linux kernel because it "controls" everything.

Different distros has a lot of different tools to offer and it is up to you which ones you feel the most comfortable with. I mean for example Mandrake or Fedora come with a great set of GUI tools that make you feel like you are still using Windows - everything is automated, it detects your hardware without any problems and stuff like that, whereas Slackware for example is just a plain and simple distribution that isn't stuffed with various GUI tools and stuff ... you do most of things by editing config files ... it may sometimes be tiring but also very rewarding and causes you to think a little more while doing something in your system not just clicking "NEXT" ... the more time you spend on something, the harder you think how to solve some kind of a problem the faster you learn and using "hardcore distros" [Slackware is often called that way] begins to be as quick and easy as distros loaded with GUI tools. So ... I don't want you to get me in a wrong way. It is your choice which distro you will be using.

I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop and successfully use Slackware on this machine, before that I was using Dell Inspiron 5000 and also didn't have any problems with it. I've been using Slack from the very beginning when I started to take linux as a serious OS and the saying "Once you get slack, you'll never go back" came true :)

You may find a lot of useful information here: http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/dell.html