After trying nearly 10 different distros, each one on multiple disks, I think I've discovered that my computer is too new to be fully supported by Linux. I was able to get Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 working and that's it, mostly because of graphics issues during installation (both 32 and 64 bit installs). Even under Ubuntu I had problems with my wireless card that no online tutorial seemed to fix and a fan that would not shut up.

Anyway, I've gone back to Vista, and it's working like a dream (fast, stable, etc.). But the one thing it doesn't have that I've always liked with Linux is the customizability, which is really eating at me. I'm happy with using Vista for now (I don't have much time to mess around with my computer this semester), but I wanted to change back to Linux within a couple months.

I have, I thought, a pretty average computer: HP Pavillion dv5, AMD Turion X2 64-bit processor, ATI Radeon 3200 HD graphics card, and a Atheros 242x wireless card. Although these seem to be pretty common components, installation has been extremely difficult for every distro. My question is: If I come back to Linux in a couple of months, is there a good chance that my computer will have more support for it? How often do compatibility issues like this get fixed?

A couple of months? Probably not. If you wait until the next release of Ubuntu, probably. You might want to just check periodically on your specific problems. The biggest was probably the wireless card. That one's just not completely ready for prime-time in Linux. As to the case fan, I can't respond. If I had it in hand, I'd probably be able to get it going, but to help someone online without having one --- it's difficult.

I don't know why you would have problems. I thought Atheros was considered the most Linux friendly of any wireless chipset maker?

With Ubuntu, there are a lot of tutorials showing how to get Atheros cards working using Mad Wifi. I've tried them all to the letter and they never work.

I didn't see anything in your specs that shouldn't work.

Figure out what's not working, research it and more often than not you will find the working solution for your distro of choice.

Just a matter of reading.................and asking the right question(s).

you give up to easy.

I have a dv6000 with similar specs. Linux runs no problem. About the only real difference is that mine has an NVidia graphics card.

madwifi works quite well for the Atheros cards.

I run Slack on it, but have installed and tested Fedora, Debian, and PCLinuxOS. They all worked fine once properly configured.

I doubt the problem is with your computer, or Linux, but rather with your lack of knowledge and experience. Not a knock against you, just an observation. With the right knowledge you should be able to have Linux installed and correctly configured in just a couple of hours.

I faced this same problem when I first bought my now almost three year old HP Pavilion. HP does lots of proprietary nonsense. I still get error messages and the odd kernel panic. For the first couple of months I could not get any distro to install until I tried SimplyMEPIS and for the next six months it was the only one that would install. Later I could get Ubuntu to install. Slowly other ones caught up.

It wasn't for lack of trying, either. I tried dozens of distros. I tried every known boot parameter. I think that lots of it had to do with the BIOS. Some of it had to do with new hardware. SATA drives weren't all that common then. But it was really irritating for the first several months. Now it is old hat.

Since yours and mine are both HP computers, I feel that you will have some catch up as I experienced, but there will be some on-going issues which you will have to learn to work around. BTW, I contacted HP which claimed at the time to support Linux and they told me that that my computer was specifically made to work with Windows XP MCE and that if I installed Linux that I would be on my own. So much for supporting Linux.

I like my HP computer. It has worked out well, but it was not as straight forward as it should have been.

On the one hand, I am quite sure that "you gave up on Linux much too soon."

But on the other hand, I am also quite sure that you were ill-advised to regard your decision as being "an either-or choice."

It isn't.

At this moment, I am writing this missive on "a Linux machine." If I turn my head one-quarter turn to the left, I am gazing at another laptop which has run Windows-XP "all its born days," and most likely it always will. If I now turn my head ninety degrees to the right, I'm staring at a Macintosh running OS/X.

None of these machines are "dual boot." The Linux machine is by far the oldest of the lot. All three of them are "making me $m$o$n$e$y$, every day," and ... I like that!

If you want to "run Linux," grab a machine ... or buy a good used one of recent vintage ... and "have a 'go.'" If the machine in question has absolutely nothing on it of value to you, then "you can destroy it repeatedly" and hurt nothing while you learn much. You can roll your office-chair across the room and resume typing (on, say, the Vista box...) while you gather your thoughts about "what t'hell is that Linux box (over there...) doing?"

I don't think it's really for lack of trying or researching. I spent hours trying to get a lot of this stuff to work and tried plenty of different distros. I've also asked questions on this site and Ubuntu's forums. I'm sure if I were to try a little more, I could probably get some distro working right now (Ubuntu did work, just not well), but I don't have the time. I'd rather spend maybe my Christmas break trying to load different distros and was just hoping their might be some updates in the near future that I hadn't seen or heard about.

Don't know if this will be the answer, but F10 is due for release at the end of the month: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/Schedule . Might be worth a look...

just jumping distros won't help. while different distros have the kernel set up in different ways; all distros use the same kernel and can be configured for all the same hardware. so any distro you like can be made to work with your hardware it just requires some tweaking. people expect things to just work out of the box, but that's not how it works. In fact I distinctly remember my last few windows installs being a total pain in the ass as I had to find and install drivers for just about everything (IDE, graphics, sound, network, etc) I think if you just have the windows install disk and an ubuntu install disk and try them out on some random computer ubuntu would suport more hardware out of the box then windows. (I'm not talking about the OEM restore disks that came with the computer that's cheating. true there are some sticking points; the most notable of which are WiFi cards. the fact is there is a huge variety of these things and most manufacturers don't even bother suporting linux so many of the drivers have to be reverse-enginered. chances are windows won't support your wifi out of the box either you'll need the driver that came with it and then it will work. on linux it's going to take a bit more tweaking. I've even had to go as far as editing the source of the driver and recompiling it. it's just going to take some persistance and asking for help when you get stuck. some tutorials might not work because they are outdated or there are slight variations in the hardware.

Had a noisy fan on my system due to it was motherboard speed controlled and just installed the motherboard drivers to adjust the speed down. Can also be done from the bios in most cases.