Choice of Linux for a laptop?
 

Hey guys,
I hope that this is an appropriate place in which to post this; I'm not yet new to linux, but I possibly will be soon.
The issue is this; going to uni last September, I bought myself a new laptop. Ooh, shiny, right? Well, no - it runs MS Windows Vista. I cannot stand it. I've been becoming more and more disillusioned with Windows for a while, for various reasons, and am now interested in just getting away altogether - and the best option that I can see, from talking to people and checking various net sites etc, is Linux.
My simple question is this: is it worth putting Linux on a laptop, or does a laptop just not hold enough memory and hard drive? I can't find any definitive answer anywhere.
Many thanks.

If it has enough space and power to run Vista, Linux will be a cakewalk for it. I'm running Linux very happily on a 7 year old Dell laptop with a 700Mhz PIII and 384mb of RAM. I also have a newer Acer laptop with a 1.6Ghz Celeron M and 2gb of RAM, it also runs Linux very nicely.

Many, many thanks for the answer; you've cleared up the final issue holding me back. It look like I will be going shopping soon!

Hi,

I would suggest that you look at some LiveCD distributions to get a feel of what works for you.

This link and others are available from 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

no doubt in my mind you have the power to run it but the thing is you gotta check the HCL or hardware compatibility lists, not just here but things your not sure about type

"<part name> on linux"

into google....

this saves you from big headaches...



.

Well, to a Linux fan, then it would have to be a really crappy laptop not to be worth putting Linux on it.

What I don't understand is why, if this is your question why you didn't say how much memory (& the processor) that your laptop has. However:

• If it was bought recently, the hardware will be powerful enough
• If Vista runs at anything other than a crawl, it will be powerful enough

More likely to a problem is wireless. Of course, this isn't an issue if you don't need wireless. Alternatively, it can usually be made to work with a bit of effort on your part / asking around, but if you expect it to take at least a little effort, you will be well prepared.

Thanks you for the advice; it is being taken into consideration.
Also, apologies for not adding in enough information about the laptop. I'm using an Advent; Intel Core Duo processor with 80GB hard drive and 1024MB memory. From above posts, I deduce that I should be perfectly able to run Linux. I will eventually have to sort out wireless - is this very difficult to do? I have the time and patience to deal with problems, and am expecting to meet many troubles before I'm done, however any advice as to where to start would be gratefully recieved.
Many thanks.

The wireless used on centrinos runs out of the box on all ubuntu (ubuntu/kubuntu/xubuntu/edubuntu/etc.) since 6.06 (or 6.10, I don't remember). Ubuntu is now on 8.04. I can't speak for other distros, but on ubuntu wireless isn't a problem.

I'm running kubuntu 8.04 on a laptop I bought in January. The specs are:
-HP dv6500 series laptop
-Centrino Duo, 1.5GhZ
-2GB DDR2
-Intel 4965ABGN wireless card

About the only thing that doesn't work (or rather I haven't bothered to figure out how to make work) is the fingerprint reader. The card slot doesn't read anything other than SD (no memory stick, somewhat unfortunately since I have a Sony camera). I think this is true for pretty much all laptop card reader devices. Good luck!

Check out Live CDs see if those work fine, In general you should be good to go if the Laptop is based on the centrino Platform (Intel CPU, Intel Wireless, Intel Graphic). I haven't had a problem with a Laptop to run Linux in like 2 years. Wireless has improved much (and will even more during the Google summer of Code I guess ;) ).

Just Check out the LiveCDs if those work you are fine. For a beginner I suggest Distributions like (K)(X)Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, MAndriva, OpenSUSE, if your kind of adventures check out Fedora, its not for everybody I guess but I Love it for Security and Bleeding Edge reasons ;).