So I thought I'd give Ubuntu a go, since I'm trying livecd versions before I actually format my laptop. Tried PCLinuxOS 0.92, worked relatively well, though I had to add the ndiswrapper and use a Windows driver for my Dell wireless NIC (Truemobile 1300, uses a Broadcom chipset). Tried to do the same thing from the livecd of Ubuntu...wow THAT WAS DIFFERENT. It took me forever to get my ntfs partition mounted, just to be able to get the files accessible to install the ndiswrapper. Then, I couldn't do the make install that I did on PCLinuxOS to install the NDISwrapper. Any ideas? It could be that I'm just not used to doing things from a logged-in user account without root privileges, then using sudo to do everything - maybe I'm not entering the correct syntax at the console.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to know, since I like everything else about Ubuntu more than PCLinuxOS (I even think I like Gnome more than KDE).

Cheers,
djbouti9

Dunno about the liveCD - but as a distro I'm pretty impressed with what it did on my laptop yesterday.
Picked up my Cisco 350 card without issue, and the onboard LAN (e100) - I'd be mighty surprised if it doesn't handle the broadcom.

I'm not a fan ofthe non-root setup - see ubuntuforums.org for some threads; I (amongst others) have also posted here on LQ.
"sudo su" works BTW ...

Fixing the "non-root" thing in Ubuntu is trivially easy--just assign a password to root: "sudo passwd root", non-root passwd at the prompt, then the new root passwd.
In the menus is the command to allow root to login to a GUI session:
System-->Adminstration-->login screen setup-->Security-->allow root user...