More specifically, a pavilion dv8225nr. I am new to this and i am sick of windows. I have had to do 3 destructive restores and my laptop is under a year old. So I have been researching all this week about hardware compatibility. What can I say, I am lost, I have no idea which linux to install, really aiming towards graphical based and not text based. Any suggestions will help greatly.

(Currently) More then a year later... I have had to do several more restores... tried several times to get my wireless to work with Ubuntu... even the latest 8.04... i wish someone would print out screenshots of each step to get it working. I guess I have spent so much time repairing windows through DOS, that commands in Linux are Greek to me. I feel like I am going to cry... and out of all the Linux so called addicts that are my friends can't seem to get it working either.

Jennifer

I'd grab Ubuntu if I were you. It's by far the easiest out of the box. http://www.ubuntu.com/

I've been using Ubuntu on my dv8225nr and the support is just fine. Everything works out of the box except you need to install fglrx drivers if you want 3d acceleration. Also the wireless card firmware needs to be installed. Here's a quick info post I made a while back that worked on Edgy, the previous version of Ubuntu. I had some issues getting the fglrx driver working in Feisty, the latest version, so instead if following the guide linked there use this one and follow Method 1.

Some people will recommend using ndiswrapper for the bcm4318 wireless card but I've had nothing but problems with that method and what works WAY better is the what I posted in the previous about edgy in this post.

If you'd like to try it, this should get you up and running with Ubuntu Feisty like I did. When I first installed Ubuntu I chose to write over the recovery partition because it was wasting a lot of space. It was nice of HP to add a partition that fits linux so nicely Hope this info has been helpful...

Wow. I'm pretty sure that for a noob a simple, "Yeah Ubuntu is coo." would work fine.