i've just ordered a HP Pavilion zv5014EA laptop which i wish to LINUX. i have been thinking of suse as thats what hp seem to want to use but at present i use BLAG, and happy i am with it too but, that thought keeps nagging at me, what do other peeps think?

well what do you think, i need to run the dvd/cd, tv out, printing and net, what do you think is my best bet?

any distro will do. since you're thinking about SuSE, download and burn a copy and try it out. there's plenty of info on distros on the web - find/try the ones you think you'll like.

forgive me but i am trying to avoid the downloading and installing, actually i have the suse eval and the install disk, (dont have the laptop yet tho) but was wondering what advice others may have on the whole laptop v LINUX thing.

oh, forget not i'm a windoze convert so it has to be easy!

Distrowatch is a good site for browsing distros.

there's a bunch of different factors to consider when choosing a distro. you want an easy to use distro? SuSE is pretty easy to use. if you're happy with BLAG, i see no harm in continuing to use that. but for sure look at distrowatch.com - you'll learn a lot.

The LQ ISO and LinuxISO are also good sources for distros. Try several, then decide for yourself which fits your needs and preferences the best. Good luck with it and welcome to LQ -- J.W.

SLACKWARE of course!

All my lap tops have run Slack (including my new Presario that I'm typing this message on)!


Dell Latitude XP 450C - http://users.ev1.net/~arfonrg/xp450c-linux/

Dell Latitude CPi D300XT- http://users.ev1.net/~arfonrg/d300xt-linux/

Compaq Presario R3000- http://users.ev1.net/~arfonrg/r3000-linux/


Don't let the TEXT setup scare you with Slackware, It's REAL easy.

yeah, slackware is my personal favorite linux distro. i would even recommend looking into freebsd, it's amazing. but remember

>oh, forget not i'm a windoze convert so it has to be easy!

so maybe slack or freebsd may not be a good transition into the linux/unix world.

thank you good people for your valuable input, while i am waiting on delivery of said laptop i shall head over to distro watch and check that out, mind you i have quite a selection of distros here to choose from, see it took me ages to settle with a distro for my desktop, mainly as my desktop puts up such a fight each time i try any distro, BLAG saw through its oddness and set up sweet, strange as fc2 didnt like my box at all.

well i guess there is no real laptop specific distro then, and just cos hp use suse its no reason for me to, i dont think i will be attacking the slack install tho, it hated my box and gave me a hard time, it was actually worse for me with ver 10 than with the previous version, so its looking like i am talking myself into BLAG again but we shall see, i expect i will be playing with distros for a while to come, its a good clean hobby that keeps me away from the bars.

thanks again all

Slackware and freebsd are my favorites. Been in the market for a laptop, wasn't sure which one I was going to put on it. So I bought a toshiba with a 80 gig harddrive, and gonna put both slack and freebsd on it , woohoo!! (I know, I know I need to get out more, hehe) and keep windows on it.

Hello there Shabene and others!

I have had experience of installing different linux distros on different notebooks. The one I am typing now is running Debian Sid with KDE 3.3. It's a tablet PC Acer C110. Debian runs just fine and I have all of the notebooks hardware recognised and configured. The hardware driver support in 2.6 kernel series is starting to get exciting. Before I came to Debian, I was a strong Suse fan. I have used Slackware since 2.x, Red Hat, Mandrake, SUSE since 6.0, even Xandros.

Suse is a good distro. It is definitely much more adequate for a laptop than both Free BSD and Slackware. If I were you, I would look into a choice of Suse 9.1 or Debian (Knoppix) distro. Knoppix is a good distribution, which can be installed to a harddrive after testdriving it running it from CD. It is actually based on Debian sarge.

I find Debian better for notebooks than any other distro for a number of reasons:

- Debian Sid is always a cutting edge distro because of Apt. Apt-get is the easiest package maintenance system and the best working one, compared to rpm.

- Packages are installed with just one command and surprisingly are well configured to run after installation with no or minimal user intervention.

- It is completely free software..

Suse on the other hand does not update to newer versions of packages and generally issue security updates only.

SUSE Linux might be a good choise at the beginning but look closely at Debian.

Good luck!

**UPDATE**

well the laptop is here and works fine, well in xp but i'm working on that...

tried a few live cd's, knoppix wont boot at all, tried a few codes but nothing seemed to work, kanotix boots fine and so does suse but both without sound, that shortened my prospective install list.

so i have installed kanotix, and its nice too, to be honest i think its the only way bods like me can get a debian install, i gave up on the 5 disk monster pretty quick.

anyways i spose the point is i still need a little help on setup, sound wise that is. prob be better in another thread but if anyone knows about soundMAX or hp pavilions i'm all ears.

p.s. cheers all!

Congrats on the new laptop - if you have any issues, questions, comments, etc, please post back here. Sound-related problems are pretty common regardless of what PC you are using; basically most of them just boil down to configuration issues. I'd recommend taking full advantage of the Search functionality here at LQ to locate similar threads. Chances are high that the same question has already been asked, hopefully with a successful solution. -- J.W.

Blag is based on Fedora Core 1. I have heard of some issues with FC2 and older hard ware.
I ran blag for a while. I loved it. I run fedora core 2 now.
I have and older laptop that I run Suse 9.0 on currently. It runs good I just don't like that distro as much as I do fedora, blag or, slack.
Slackware takes a little more learning But it ran beautifuly on my laptop.

Just my .02

I use slackware 10 on my laptop (compaq armada m300). Since slack uses an older kernel (2.4.x) I first compiled the 2.6.8 kernel and got started...

It was a painful road but i learned my way around the OS (fumble around might be better wording) and now I have it running pretty smooth. I suggest Slack if you are serious about learning. If you are easily frustrated approach slack with caution.

I run slackware on my Gericom Hummrer, with the 2.6.7 kernel from CD-2. I had to recompile the kernel to allow acpi, but everything runs really well.

Hope you find what you're looking for.