There is an interesting driverless alternative that will work with a USB 2.0 laptop.

Belkin makes a wireless ethernet gaming bridge that is powered off of the USB port instead of a normal electric outlet. If you have USB 1.1 on an older laptop, you may have to get one of those split 2 into 1 USB cables. That way, you'll have enough power.

Here is the link to Belkin, where they can be purchased. Compusa or Newegg may also be pretty reasonable.

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProdu...uct_Id=170842#

You also must have a working ethernet card, either built in or a PCMCIA card.

My favorite part of this link is the part where they say "No drivers are required", music to my ears.

Mempis works fine on hp compaq nx6110 laptop.
My personal satisfaction was to move out "windows inside" notice and replace it with personaly printed "linux inside".lol

If you go to http://www.dell.com/linux you will be greeted by bare metal computers with no operating systems. They have laptops (notebooks in dell-speak) desktops and workstations.

The laptops technically come with free dos, which you use to verify that the computer turns on and off.

Be sure to get as much RAM as you can and the DVD burner. The Intel wireless for $20 may work better with some types of Linux then Dell's. Mepis should work just fine on a naked laptop. Dell does give you a warranty for the hardware.

it's an aging laptop at 700mghtz but it does well with every version of linux i ever put on it but i must say that with mepis there is an issue with the synaptics touchpad, it won't scroll like it did with ubuntu. i would be using ubutu instead but i like that i have access to my windows partition from in mepis, includeing read and write priveleges. makes it easy to work on a file that way.

can someone help me with the synaptics touchpad please?

mdlinuxwolf:

Have you (or anyone else reading) tried one of those dell laptops you mentioned? If yes, then what was it like?

All OEM installs are a little different. It isn't like buying it at the store. The advantage to buying a bare medal laptop is that mechanically speaking, laptop kits are a pain in the neck to work with. You had better REALLY like jeweler's pliers, tweezers and screwdrivers. A good magnifying glass helps out a lot when building a laptop kit. The advantage is that you get a warranty on the hardware.

Having said that, I love kits. I used to build model rockets and planes that really worked as a kid. I also have rebuilt many a carburetor in my time as well. Not everyone feels the same.

It is like anything else you build yourself, except for loose screws. The software side of it should be like putting a new blank hard drive into your computer for the very first time.

I haven't done one of these exact models yet. I expect to have to test between 4 to 6 versions of Linux before I'm totally satisfied that I've got the best. I'll also try Solaris and a flavor of BSD when I buy one of these. If you run any type of Windows, the Deep Burner freeware program is excellent for burning bootable CDs and DVDs from .iso files. It almost makes Windows palatable..... almost.

Open Solaris ONLY runs on 32 bit x-86 processors. Still, if you must do 32 bit and everything works, Sun is the best.

I haven't used them, but they look good and I've heard good things about them. Buy laptops preinstalled with ubuntu:
http://system76.com/index.php

Where's the fun in that? The whole point of freeware is getting your hands dirty, setting a few custom encrypted partitions, dual or triple booting........ Aaaaaaahhhh !! fun fun fun

I say, put the money in hardware. Linux is one of the few remaining things that is still free in this country.

I've used both actually.... I was up until recently running MEPIS 3.43 and have just recently switched to 6.0 both on my Dell C610 (old laptop but runs Mepis great with it's gig of ram)

Machine:
Toshiba Satellite M35 S456
1.7 GHz Pentium M 735
512 MB RAM
Intel "Centrino" with built-in Intel PRO/100VE ethernet and PRO/Wireless 2200BG
nVidia GeForce FX Go5200 grafx w/64MB VRAM
15.4" Widescreen display 1280x800 native res.
80GB HDD The Toshiba manual says "Toshiba" but it may actually be a Matsushita.
--Machine purchased August or September 2004
WindowsXP Home pre-installed with a lot of other "trial software" crap and some good Toshiba laptop utilities that work well under Windows.

Using GParted I shrunk the Windows hda1 partition from the whole 80GB to 11 GB after a lot of preparation.

This is not a really Linux-friendly machine. Ubuntu Dapper not only would not install on it, it trashed the partition table. [I did get it back] Many LiveCD distros cannot access the wireless connection, and ditto some installed Linux distros.

The successes I have had that were most notable [previously]:
MyahOS 2.1 and 2.3
PCLinuxOS Big Daddy

Mepis 6.0 was alright, but slow.
I beta-tested the new Mepis 6.04 beta versions 1-4 none of which did very well as LiveCDs in getting my wireless or display to work correctly, so I did not install any. Beta 5 LiveCD got the Centrino Wireless working, so I installed it, and then the same with Mepis 6.5 beta6, which installed well and ran well.

Currently I have Mepis 6.5 beta7 installed on a 6GB partition with separate /home and swap partitions. It works very well, and is very fast!

The only 2 "issues" that I have are:
1] as with my 19" widescreen DFP monitor on my desktop [1440x900], Mepis6.5 Beta7 does not offer the correct 1280x800 resolution for the laptop's widescreen display via GUI configuration.

Since I know how to manually edit the xorg.conf file, this is not a problem. But anyone who doesn't know how would need to get help doing it.

2] This is not a Mepis-specific problem. There is something whacked with either the Phoenix BIOS which is a non-standard little crapfest, or the HDD itself. GRUB simply does not function when installed to the MBR. Not with Mepis, not with any distro. It just goes to level 1 and then hangs. No GRUB console, no error message --and no ctl-alt-del. . . I have to unplug the AC power and take out the battery to shut it off.

So I use the LILO from PCLinux to chainload Mepis via the GRUB installed on hda8. That works. Don't ask me to explain it.

Once it is booted, Beta7 is the fasteest KDE desktop I've ever used. Even Firefox, which can be a bit slow, under Mepis 6 and other distros, zips along startlingly quickly.

I have an IBM 1.6 GHz Centrino T-42 ThinkPad with 512 G RAM. I have run Kanotix, PCLinuxOS, and Mepis on this machine. I have run both Mepis 3.43 and currently Mepis 6. All of these distros worked well (dual booting with WinXP), but Mepis, as usual, was the easiest install and everything but the fingerprint reader worked immediately. I set up the wireless with WEP without problems. I am waiting for the final release of Mepis 6.5 or 2007 or whatever they choose to call it. I hope it appears in the next few days. I use the T-42 as my main machine for work and although I have several multiple booting desktop machines here with Suse, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Dreamlinux and other distros on them, Mepis remains my favorite and hence gets pride of place on the notebook.

CarlosP

Hi, CarlosP.

Did you try putting Dapper on the Thinkpad?
I ask because I could not get it to install correctly on my Toshiba Satellite. I haven't tried it with Edgy.

--SilverBear

Here is a link to some laptop discussion at mepislovers.org
http://www.mepislovers.org/index.php/topic,2451.0.html
Fits in this thread just fine so take a look.

I haven't tried Dapper on the ThinkPad. I have it on three desktops which multiboot with XP and Mepis. Mepis is better than Dapper on all 3 desktop machines, so I haven't been tempted to replace Mepis with Dapper on the ThinkPad.

Yesterday I downloaded and burned Mepis 6.5 rc-1. I have run it on the ThinkPad as the live-CD, but have not installed it as yet. I am troubled by the fact that I can't get the live-CD to complete the boot sequence on 2 of my desktops. I have never seen this problem with any previous version of Mepis.

I downloaded and burned Linux Mint 2.2 as well and had similar problems on 2 of the 3 machines. The checksums were ok for both iso's so I am at a loss. It will have to wait until next weekend when I have more time.

CarlosP

I just put Mepis 6.5 on my old desktop and I've had no problems with it so far, besides finding multimedia support..... again.

The live CD boots on the desktop, but can't use the wireless.

Mandrive One Metisse gets online from the live CD.

I will test the SuSE live DVD and the regular Mandriva One without the eye candy if I can find it.

As an update:

I recently acquired a Lenovo Laptop with Vista Business on it. I have to keep my certs up and I want to get ahead of the crowd, which is still on XP. Mepis 6.5 behaved very well on my desktop, where it happily dual booted with XP on a nice 1/4 terabyte SATA 2 drive and a Promise SATA 2 PCI card.

The live CD stated that rebooting was necessary to see the wireless, so I went ahead and installed it. GRUB was able to dual boot Vista without incident. However, when the installed version hit the login screen, it didn't work. It said that it couldn't find the network and then would not allow me to log in with my name or password. It just kept looping back to the login screen.

Then I tried Mandriva Metisse, which managed to function properly with the live CD and get online. This time, when installed on the hard drive with Vista, it got as far as the ALSA driver for sound and then froze and wouldn't boot further.

After I got rid of them both, GRUB wouldn't go away. With XP their is a trick to revert to Windows only. You put in the CD and go to the repair screen. You issue the command fixmbr and then issue the fixboot command. After that is done, remove the Windows Cd and reboot.

Vista also has a boot loader repair for BCEDIT..... but it can't reverse GRUB. Therefore, you have to re-install Vista. You choose New Install (the only choice if you aren't in the operating system). After that, you refuse to format or delete the partition. Vista will then place all of your old data into a folder called Windows.old. You can retrieve it later.

The good news is that without all the bloatware, Vista now only uses about 500 to 600 megabytes of RAM instead of 700 to 800. Also, I got some experience installing Windows "finest".

Basically, putting Linux on a laptop dual booting with Linux was a total failure. There is no non-destructive way to uninstall GRUB. If you do this and don't like it, you can't go back and reclaim the space for the Linux partition. I suppose you could shrink the Linux partition to the max and expand Vista's to take up the slack. I felt that was not a pleasing solution to the problem.

Vista can't repair its own bootloader, that's the problem.