Hello, Ive got a Dell 300m running xp home and thought it would be more efficent to switch to Linux. I talked to my friend about drivers and he says to get Seus Linux for good drivers, he also said that I would have trouble with things like my wireless network card. Ive got a dell truemobile card, does anyone know where I can get drivers for linux on that?,
thanks,
John

As far a drivers for wireless networks goes I found that Mandrake10.1 works good for me. Thats all I really know about wireless networks.

I'm running Mandrake 10 and it is known to one of the easiest distros to run for the first time. The biggest piece of advice I can give you is to make sure you have another computer with internet access available whilst setting your computer up. I had so many questions and google helped me with 80% of my problems (well this forums also helps!). You might also want to try out Running Linux by Oreilly, though most of the information you need can be found on the web.

I meant specifically Mandrake10.1. I had problems setting up my wireless network with Mandrake10

Has anyone transfered to linux on a dell?, I need help with my specific drivers. Is there a good site a with a good library of drivers availible?

I was looking on Mandrakelinux, it looks pretty nice and seems to have a lot of drivers, I am going to verify this and probably go with this version, Are there any major complaints about Mandrakelinux?

I've got Mandrake running on my dell 600m notebook (dual boot with xp) and on my dimension 2350. I'm not sure if the centrino functionality works in Mandrake 10; I'd do a few googles to be sure.

why don't you check your manufacturers website for drivers. If they support linux you should see them there. I recently made the switch to SuSE, then I added Slackware. I deleted windows xp pro forever from my hd. SuSE is mad easy to install. Slackware is a little bit more work, but you learn alot too. So good luck buddy

Anymore it seem like choosing a distro is mostly a preference thing. Mandrake, Suse are easier to use but Slackware and the alike are more traditional not a lot of excess bs. You might try a bootable cd like Knoppix or MandrakeMove to start with they can give a little idea of what you are going to deal with.

When you're looking at compatibility of wireless cards you have to work out what chipset the card has, some work very well others less or not at all.

A bit of googling with the full name of your card would most likely tell you the chipset and from there it should be fairly easy to figure out whether you can use it and which drivers you can use.

Eg. if your card is a Dell Truemobile 1150 then (according to google) it's a rebadged orinoco gold card with a hermes chipset and thus you should be able to use orinoco drivers.. on the other hand, if it's a 1400 your out of luck as the chipset is different and AFAIK unsupported..

I installed Mandrake 10.0 on my Inspiron 5000 with absolutely NO trouble except for my wireless card (no LInux support yet for a D-Link DWL-G630 ) At least I still have my ehternet card to fall back on.

I had a MINOR irritation with MDK 9.x in that if I installed with an external mouse plugged in I couldn't use the touchpad, and vice versa. With 10.0 they seem to have solved that....

Why don't you try buying a copy of VMWare and run Linux in the VM for a while. There is a big learning curve here and you'll need internet access to help you resolve problems. Just my .02 cents

The reason I suggested Knoppix is that there is no need for any installation of anykind. Just boot from the CD.

I installed SuSE 9.1 Professional edition on my Dell C640. No major Problems. Everything is detected and works, including the built-in WinModem...

Mandrake 10.1 on my Dell Dimension 2400 works great! No hardware issues, no software issues that I didn't cause. I'm gonna go to slack some time this week.
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Forgot to include I originally started with Mandrake 10.0 and that worked flawlessly as well.
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