Best Laptop Distro
 

I have a Compaq Presario 2580US and I'm wanting dual boot linux so i can learn how to use it, so I was wondering which distro is best for a fairly new laptop. I'm not a complete newbie, but I dont really know what im doing. I want something that will allow me to learn how to use linux but is small enough so i can continue to dual boot XP. Hopefully , i will eventually be able to switch entirely over to Linux.

So which distro is best for a laptop?

Hi, Ia newbie, I've installed a Mandrake 10.0 CE on my laptop IBM thinkpad R40 and it's allright, the distro recognized without any problem the audio and even the video card, it detected also the wi-fi integrated card... The only thing missing is the internal 56k modem, dut it's not so important... So I can say that if you want to try with mandrake 10.0 it's ok...
P.S. lindows made a version of his OS 4.5 in a "laptop edition", I know that it's not like a real linux distro, but if you were searching for something thought for laptop you can also try this...

bye;)

suse 9.0 works great on my hp pavilion, everything works without having to do a kernel compile.


It's also pretty awesome.

:):twocents:

I've worked with RedHat, Mandrake and Slackware and of the 3 I chose to stick with Slackware not because it was the easiest to install, but because it had the best install of default apps that I've seen. All the libraries that Mandrake gave me trouble with (zLib, gdbm, etc.) were already there and I wasn't forced to install apache or sendmail like RedHat makes you do . . .

hallamigo, what are the differences between the mandrake installation and the slackware one? It's really so difficult? :study:
I mean, the difficulty is that it hasn't a GUI for the installation or something else? After the installation it's the same like the other distro's?
thnaks:)

In slackware, you basically have to configure everything. I have been using linux for over a year and I have some experience with slackware but I still have problems doing a new installation. You really need to know what you are doing if something goes wrong. Dont get me wrong, I am not saying its bad, all I am saying is that if you are a newbie do yourself a favour and go with redhat, mandrake or some similar distro.
Hope it helps

I wanted to know this kind of things! So thank you! I think the same: when I'll have more experience with linux I'll move from my actual Mandrake toward an hard distro, like slackware or debian... Only for the pleasure of making my life more complicated... :Pengy:

The hell, I gonna say Gentoo anyway. Eventhough it's not easy to install, but I consider laptop to be a portable device, and if I can maximize it's power and usability to the best, then it's great. That's why I choose gentoo. you can handpicked just about everything, and compiled to optimize your cpu power and need. So you get the most out of it and save your precious battery power.

I went through SuSE 8.0 and 8.2 then Mandrake 9.2 with my HP XE3L and it wasn't ever quite the portable box I wanted -- problems with sound, pcmcia, apic and so on. Then I tried running Knoppix 3.3 - everything worked out of the box so I did a hdd install and now I'm Debian through and through!!!

typo edited at 20:47 :)

Come to think of it - if you follow the Slackware-HOWTO that comes with the CD Slack is really not that hard at all and I've found it to not be as resource consuming as Redhat and Mandrake.

I mainly use Slack on my laptop because that is what I use on my servers. I like to have daily interaction and tweak time on a distro that allows me to turn around and fine tune my servers. :-D

you can only learn so much about linux through mandy and the like. Once you have the basics down, like how your filesystem works, and a couple of commands under your belt, take the slack plunge. It's really not bad at all; in fact, the only thing I really had to configure was xfree86, and xf86 pretty much holds your hand through the whole thing. I just wish package management was a little ... easier? ... more developed? in slack.

If your notebook is wireless, you might consider debian. What you get on the cd's is a bunch of old software, but after you pick, choose and configure, it's really easy to update to the latest versions. In fact, once you get through installing it, it's really easy to do anything! Apt rules.

you can try a few and stick to what works best with your laptop. i have tried mandrake 9.1, redhat 9.0, knoppix (live cd and HD install), mandrake 9.2 and slacware 9.1 (in that order). i stuck with slack as everything works. the slackware book (online and in the slackware source CD) and LQ are your best friends when installing slack.

:newbie:

I too would recommend Gentoo Linux. With Gentoo, you can squeeze every last drop of performance out of your laptop while taking advantage of all the new laptop-friendly features of the bleeding edge kernels and applications. You can also configure your system just right, saving disk space and memory.

http://www.gentoo.org/

I run it on my Dell Inspiron 600m.

Laptop Distro
 

A distro for laptops. I found that Linuxmint worked out of the box with no problems including the wireless adapter. I tried it on an old p2 with a dell wireless adapter and the speed was faster than on my wired network!

It has a nice set of software ready to go and I was able to test the os using the live cd - there is an install option to hard disk included.

Linuxmint is for people who want to get up and running fairly quickly without having to do any configuration.

Laptop/Wifi Distros
 

Although this is an old post (2004) here are some recent distros to try on modern laptops:
Try in this order, and choose the one you like most:
1. Hymera
2. Vector
3. PC/OS
4. OpenSUSE
5. Slackware (The most stable linux I've ever used (including the packages in the repository), but very time consuming to customize and build packages with dependencies - IT WILL NEVER FREEZE ON YOU)