Best distribution for HP 2000 laptop
 

Does anyone have any experience with or any ideas on which might be the best distribution for a 2012 HP 2000 laptop? I tried the latest Ubuntu, but I could not get it to connect to the wireless. Anyone have experience with this laptop and distros?

What is your wireless chipset? If you tell us, we can probably help you get it working. If you're not sure, use the terminal command:

If you have already tried certain steps to get your wifi working, then please let us know what you have tried and what were the exact error messages. Sometimes it is as simple as flipping the hardware switch that toggles the wifi on/off. :)

Only thing I can find online is that model uses an Atheros adapter. I've had several such adapters in laptops and they worked right out of the box with vanilla Debian, which does NOT install non-free firmware or drivers by default, so Ubuntu should do better.

What do you mean by does not work? Do you get a list of networks? It just fails to connect to one?

A quick search for "hp 2000 wireless internet ubuntu" showed you're not the only one with problems, but there are solutions.

I think I figured out the problem. I was using the amd64 iso image and that is what gave me problems. I have an Intel Pentium. I burned and used the i386.iso and I am able to connect without any problems. Now that I have finished trying Ubuntu, I wanted to install it on my machine. I read all the installation guides I could find and shrunk the volume of Windows on the hard drive. As I tried to load either 12.04 or 12.10, I am coming up against something that is not talked about in the guides. When I get to the Installation Type page, instead of saying that Windows 7 is also installed, would I like to install ubuntu along side (as the guides say), I get "This computer currently has multiple operating systems on it." My options are Erase disk and install ubuntu or Something else. When I go to Something else and see the Device for boot loader installation, which should I pick? I have sda, sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4 and an unusable. The unusable looks like the space I freed up on the hard drive for ubuntu. Here is what I see:

/dev/sda ATA Hitachi ser no. (500.1 Gb)
/dev/sda1 Windows 7 (loader) ntfs 208mb 69mb used
/dev/sda2 Windows 7 (loader) ntfs 254861mb 85979mb used
unusable 219909mb
/dev/sda3 Windows Recovery Environment (loader) ntfs 20865mb 18595 used
/dev/sda4 fat 4260mb 3107mb used

The sda2 is the volume I shrunk in windows. Will Ubuntu let me use the unusable mb because that is the free space I gathered to put ubuntu on it. Should I load Ubuntu the sda2 and then will it use the unusable to load the distro?
Any and all help would be appreciated.

Post output ofYou have 4 primary partitions already is 1 of them an extended?

It does not look like any of them are extended. Here is the output

Partition ### Type Size Offset
Partition 1 Primary 199Mb 1024KB
Partition 2 Primary 237Gb 200Mb
Partition 3 Primary 19Gb 442Gb
Partition 4 Primary 4063Mb 461Gb

Ideas?

Since there are no extended partiuions you should open a new thread & wait for 1 of the Guru's to help.
Me personally I suggest getting a usb enclosure with another hdd, because in order to install linux you may have to remove an existing partition.

OK, that sounds like a good plan. I will open a new thread. Thanks for your help, everyone.

You're welcome