For Mother's Day this year, I bought my wife a Dell Inspiron 1501. It came with Vista on it, which I immediately planned to replace. My wife knows jack about computers, and just wants her computer to work. I have been trying to do that recently, with no success. I've only been using linux since around January. There's a LOT that I don't know.

First thing I did is install Ubuntu 7.04 using the guide(s) at ubuntu1501.blogspot.com. Feisty (ubuntu 7.04) was wonderful, except I wasn't using a desktop, I was installing on a laptop, which uses a battery, and leaving the thing on with the lid closed doesn't help the battery life, and shutting it down every time you want to be away from the comp for a couple minutes sucks. What I'm getting at -- hibernate and suspend don't work. Searched endless forums, and found that this is a problem on multiple computers.

Second, I tried installing fedora 7. This time, hibernate worked great! But what good is a laptop if you have to have it hardwired via ethernet??? no good at all. So, I ran into the broadcom 1390 problem. Yes, this Dell has a fascist wifi chipset. And, since version 7 is only 2 weeks old, there's not much feedback. Even the stuff that is up didn't work. I pulled a ctrl+c ctrl+v on virtually everything. the most that the card will do is see my router (which works fine, because I have 3 other computers wirelessly connected. A Macbook, a Mac Mini, and a Dell Dimension 3000 running Feisty.) but it won't connect to the router. Just keeps asking for my password. Looked at a couple posts for these problems. None helped.

Then I decided to try Zod...Fedora Core 6. I used the installation guide on web.tiscali.it/belial/Dell_1501_installation_guide.html. This time everything went great until the installation. I installed ndiswrapper, and terminal gave me a "bash: ndiswrapper: command not found" so i retry... "yum -y install dkms-ndiswrapper" and it gives me the same crap.

So I try Ubuntu 6.10, and just can't get either hibernate OR the wifi to work properly. I even tried using the Edgy portions of ubuntu1501.blogspot.com.

Please, if any help can be offered, it would be greatly appreciated. I'm on the verge of selling the notebook and just buying her a Macbook. I've never been this frustrated with a computer.

Also, if any other distros are recommended, my wife doesn't really like KDE, she prefers GNOME. Main things she'll be using the computer for are pictures, dvd's, video files, youtube and other internet, e-mail, music.

Thanks in advance.

I saw a site that directed me towards http://www.TuxMobil.org and it had a lot of people that were successful with my computer, but didn't put anything about how they got it there. Just the basic "pci=nomsi" at boot before installation. I saw one that said PCLinuxOS 2007 is running flawlessly on his 1501, so I'm trying out PCLinuxOS 2007 as I type. Wifi is the best it's been. Just can't figure out how to get this thing to standby/hibernate/suspend successfully when I close the lid.

Any tipperoonies would be greatly appreciated. Thank You.

http://www.linuxonlaptops.com/ is another resource for Laptop how-to's

Best of luck

I saw that site, and it had mostly the same thing, but thanks.