I have an older Dell laptop and I had no problem with opensuse 10.2, but ever since I upgraded to eleven I had small issues. But since twelve, I cannot get even wireless to connect, or printer, and have pretty much stopped using it.
At the time I tried a couple other distros, but they had issues with the intel graphics card. I could not even see the whole desktop. Fought for days trying to get it to work.
I am very "New" to linux if you count my knowledge of it. I am an old windows user, trying to break free

I am wanting to find another distro that my laptop would work on. I am not familiar with the Command prompt commands that linux uses.

Thanks for your help, Dan.

To give you any reasonable recommendation we need information on your hardware, most important the CPU, the amount of RAM and the video-card.

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Sorry I did not think to put in the important stuff...
Now it seems like obvious information.

Boot is Grub 2
Currently OPENSUSE 12 and Windows XP
CPU: 2MB L2 Cache
- Intel Pentium M 765 (2.10GHz)
Graphics Chipset: Intel 855GM
Graphics Memory: Up to 64MB (Shared)
Memory: 333MHz DDR SDRAM
Memory: 2GB (2x SODIMM Slots)

Wireless: Intel® ProWireless 2200 (802.11b/g)

Thanks, Dan.

Looks like you machine can handle Suse12 http://en.opensuse.org/Sysreqs , is just a matter of get things working, post some error outputs would be a good start, so we can help you.

Regards

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Ah, the dreaded 855GM. I once had a laptop with this chip and sold it because Intel decided to remove video acceleration for this chip from the drivers. If you don't need video acceleration this machine should run with pretty any distro if you abstain from the heavy desktop environments like KDE, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon and Unity.
If you want something beginner friendly I would recommend Xubuntu or SalineOS for this machine.

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I don't usually suggest this but try Slax. I don't even know why I don't. It is fun and small and fast.

I assume you tried the KDE version of OpenSuse already?


At some point you may end up having to stay with older or made for older distro's.

From hardware support to oddities in the manufacture of the device will leave you with the choice of old OS or buy a new laptop.

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I have downloaded and installed Saline OS 1.7 and I am very impressed. I got printed the user manual at work, I'm also having printer issues (go figure) and every step of installation was straightforward with no surprises.

The only original issue I ran into was getting the wireless card to work. They I went to the Saline OS forum and looked under networking. The answer was one of the first threads there. The driver for the card was actually in the repository. The Intel wireless card was the problem.

The package name is firmware-ipw2x00
I accepted license and installed and it works perfectly.

I have also downloaded Mozilla and synced it and this is what I use the laptop for almost exclusively. I'm very pleased.

The only other issue I have is that when I turn my laptop on it wants a password entered into "unlock keyring" before it will let the wireless connect.

Do you have any clues to how to get rid of this and allow the laptop to log straight onto wireless without any entering of passwords?

IIRC, if you give the keyring (assuming that they use gnome-keyring) the same password as your user account it should work without being asked again.

Saline OS 1.7 looks like a good choice. Since they claim it is Debian 6 based, be sure to include search terms for problems that includes Debian as a search term.

http://nullroute.eu.org/~grawity/gno...autologin.html

Thanks so much for your help!
I am very pleased with Saline, and my laptop's performance with it.
Hopefully I can put off getting another one for a few years.
Dan.