Good distro for a new laptop?
 

Before you say it, I have already checked linuxlaptops and mine is not yet listed. My question is what distro has been good to owners of laptops? Red Hat 8 works fairly well on my HP ze4230 except I cannot for the life of me get power management to work, so no battery meter. I was wondering how Suse or Mandrake are on laptops, as I will die if I have to wait for RH 9..

Slackware. I'm biased ofcourse.:D

Re: Good distro for a new laptop?
 

For power management your laptop probably uses ACPI which is most often not enabled in the kernel by default.

I know SuSE 8.1 has an acpi enabled kernel but SuSE is an ftp install or you'll have to wait for the cd's.I'm not sure but I once read somewhere there was an acpi enabled mandrake cooker kernel.But power management is a kernel issue so just pick any distro you like.

I use slack 9.0 on a compaq presario and I have patched my 2.4.20 kernel with an acpi patch from acpi.sourcforge.net. Works like a charm. Then depending on your wm you could need a patch to get a bat monitor working I guess.

Good luck!

HC

RedHat 8.0 was good on my laptop (really shouldn't call it a laptop since keeping it running in my lap would be a fast way to get hospitalized), Mandrake 9.0 also worked fine and so did Knoppix 3.1 and Arch 0.4. All had/have the ACPI problem though.

That's the trouble. RH8 worked great except it completely lacks acpi support in the kernel. I tried to compile a 2.4.20 kernel for it but it has all sorts of problems and breaks a bunch of apps that I need. I guess I have to wait for RH9. Its only a week away anyhow. Thanks for the input people..

Mandrake 9.1 is supposed to have acpi already in the kernel, although I have no idea how to use it.

Gentoo

Mdk 9.1 works pretty awesome on my laptop. :D
acpi and all.

(A gateway 2500 pII 350 w/192 Megs of ram)

Red Hat 8.0 works great on my laptop.

[little rant] As for HP's.. after owning 3... I'll never buy one again. [/little rant]

redhat 8.0 works on my laptop inspiron 2650

I subscribed to RHN and will be downloading Red Hat 9 in the morning. Woohoo...

What was the problem with your three HP laptops? I say that about Toshiba after 3 RMA's but why the HP's?

Please disregard my Gentoo recommendation. Here's why!

Perhaps the question should be "Good laptop for new distro".

Mandrake 9.1 on my Dell Inspiron 8200 seems to work fine -- has the battery meter in my KDE panel .

it runs that hot? in that case, why not make the first linux powered pancake griddle :D