hey,

I've got me a nice little laptop ( Dell SmartPC 250N ) and i want to put linux on it


I've been using liunux now, and i find it the Ideal platform fr games development (my course at uni) However, before i go plonking on RH / Suse, i was wondering if anyone has used linux on this brand Before?

i know that there has been some problems with the modem hardware, and it has since been withdrawn from the shelves, but that was mainly due to a windows conflict ( what a suprise!!!).

Basically, I need it to make use of the 3d graphics acelleration on the Mainboard, keep the smart step features ( dunno if this is a hardware thing, but you don't know what these monkeys at M$ get up to )

Any hints? I have seen 1 report of it being done, along with a tutorial, but its a bit dated now.

Cheers

My guess is that if you're doing game development, you're going to be making use of 3D acceleration as much as possible. You may want to check around to see if any Linux drivers exist for your video card. If it's Nvidia, you're probably in good shape, since they have great Linux support. Other brands are not so certain. Sometimes XFree86 will provide a 3D acceleration driver which is decent, but not as good as it should be. So anyway, that's something to keep in mind. Though, if you're not too worried about getting high framerates, this won't be as much of an issue.

For the most part, however, you should have little difficulty running Linux on something, regardless of brand.

What are the smart step features? If they're brand-specific, they may be hard to find support for, but I've been constantly surprised by the niche drivers people have written for Linux. Check out freshmeat.net to see if there are some.

smartstep features are when the processor runs at half speed when on battery power ti get most use out of the computer.

My main concers was with teh computers overall performance while linux. i know that it runs easily on all paltforms - my dhcp server/fiewall/ipMasq machine is an old p75Mhz, and it runs like a dream. But with laptops, most of the hardware is machine specific.

the Graphics card is an ATI mobility M6 - 32Mb Graphics. I found it unusual for a laptop to have a dedicated graphics memory and processor, as most of the ones i've used in the past had shared memory, which was the deciding factor between this machine and a samsung one - which had shared memory of 64Mb for graphics

my dell has a dedicated memory nowadays you have to check before you buy but ati has linux drivers too but you have to compile them by your self

compiling is no prob. Anybody know of any MAJORLY ANNOYING glitches that might apppear? also, is there a version of wine that will run Flash MX and Counterstrike safely? every version i've tried on my desktop/server seems to fail here.


Half life 2 out on september 30th (uk), hope some genuis at valve gets a linux native out ( praying praying), or those guys at wine/wineX get a release DEDICATED to making HL2 work. games is as games does.....

Also, can anybody point me in the direction of a good resource on how to remote adminmy server through the network?

some info on wireless networking would be good too, but i'll place a seperate post in the networking section if i can't find anything suitable

If you want CLI then use ssh:
http://www.openssh.org/

If you want GUI use vnc:
http://www.tightvnc.com/

If you want a web interface use webmin:
http://www.webmin.com/

saviour. and i'm amazed you can read through my bad typing