Best/easiest distribution for an Inspiron 1501
 

I am trying to install Red Hat 9 right now and I can't get past the HD problem. Any ideas?

You could check out pclinuxos or zenwalk, two distros
that'd I would recommend.

I recently (maybe 4 months ago) installed OpenSUSE 10.2 on a Dell Inspiron 1501 with no problems. IIRC, I had to add something like "pci=nomsi" as a boot parameter, but don't quote me on that ;) (I don't have access to the machine at the moment or I'd check..)

Where did you get the drivers needed?

CentOS 5 worked wonderfully!

Are you double booting and if so what did you do about the partitions. My inspiron 1501 which runs XP has two small hidden partitions at either end of the disc.

Yeah, I'm dual booting. I used qtparted (off the SystemRescueCD Live Cd) to shrink the main partition a bit and create my Linux partitions, but I left everything else alone.

fdisk reveals


Did you have the same? Shrinking sda2 would then entail having sda4 etc between sda2 and sda3