Is there a problem with Dell Laptops or Dell equipment & Linux in general. I tried last night to load PCLinOS onto two Dell laptops owned by a friend of mine, currently XP machines. Both refused to do anything after the initial boot and hung showing one or two lines of the boot sequence. I seem to remember reading somewhere that the BIOS in Dells are OS specific, is this correct or am I imagining things.

I am a very new user having installed PCLinOS on one machine for only a week, I am however a convert - hence trying to persuade my friend to ditch XP

Harvey

I don't believe there is any personal computers that are os specific, my friend has a dell and linux works on it fine, in fact dell sells computers with linux on it. I would suggest trying a different distro on it

I don't know why...but I had A LOT of bad luck with PCLinuxOS on Dell systems...

PCLinuxOS works on all other systems I've tried it on...but I agree with AceofSpades19; there shouldn't be a problem.

On the other hand I've had great luck with Ubuntu on Dell systems...you should give it a try. Also Fedora is another good one for Dell.

-C

A year ago, I installed Suse 9.3 on my wife's Dell laptop without any problems. You might give OpenSuse a try.

debian on a dell laptop, here. Works very well.

Some distros are better suited for specific hardware. This really holds true as far as wireless goes.

The stock kernel in Pclos is getting old and may not support the newest hardware.

For a very new computer you should pick a newly released distro which may have the latest and greatest kernel.

I recently installed the new Mepis release on a laptop and it works very nice except for a couple of minor glitches which is expected in a beta or RC. Mepis will not, however, run my desktop wireless which is surprising since it supports the laptop internal Broadcom and usb Ralink perfectly.

I also find Sidux to have excellent hardware support although Broadcom still presents a problem.

You could also try the new Sam rc which is based on Pclos. It should have an updated kernel and it is working very nicely for me. Granular (Pclos) should release a new version soon with a custom kernel.

The Ubuntu(s) absolutely refuse to run any of my wireless equipment including the newest beta releases.

I'm pointing you to live cds which are best to try on untested machines. Try a few till you find one that works the best or you like the best.

How did you get wireless working? I have found that Ubuntu has the easiest wireless set up (System > Administration > Restricted Drivers Manager).

All other distros I've had to use Ndiswrapper...since Ubuntu is based on Debian was wireless easy on Debian? Just curious

I am running Fedora 8 on my Dell Inspiron E1505. The wireless setup was "easy" once I found a resource that I could use to set it up.

Initially I played around with ndiswrapper, but there was no joy in that.

Btw, previously I had Ubuntu 7.04 installed on the same notebook; so that OS works too.

Just try another distro. I had the same problem with my Toshiba L30 while installing Ubuntu Gustry,Knoppix and some others. I solved the problem by installing newer releases.