Hello All

I've been having a real rough time getting an old Dell Latitude LM I was able to get for only 21dollars US! I figure it will be worth trying to get this thing up and running, but after playing with Damnsmalllinux and having a rough time getting the VESA to properly work the LCD monitor (keep getting veritcal lines and illegible view with all possible combos of settings), I tried Slackware 9.1 and had problems with that.

I know I'm new to this stuff and so I would ask if anyone has had experience with this laptop, and if so, could they advise where I should look for good advice and technical information.

Thanks!

Go here - this guy tells of how he got Redhat 7 to run on his Dell (same as yours). Later versions probably won't run.

You could also try Slackware, Gentoo or Vector. They can be obtained from www.linuxiso.org.

Also go to www.distrowatch.com and compare distros.

Last, but definitely not least, you have 2 other options: 1) do a Search as this question (or at least similar) is asked over and over agian and 2) check out the distro reviews on this site to see what we've all written about our distros.

Thanks kindly for the info. I'm currently experimenting with Vector Linux, and am having a nice experience with the install procedure. I think this might be the distro I go with when it's all said and done, since it's clean, simple, light, and works with older hardware quite well.

I'll try to report back to this thread with my success (or failures) with this avenue of approach.

Thanks again for the help.