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Ancisace
03-28-2004, 11:09 AM
I've just bought a laptop really cheap. It's working perfectly well, apart from the fact that it has no system discs and the OS needs to be reinstalled.
Being both supernaturally tightfisted and slightly more enlightened than the fool selling me the lappy, I think this is the perfect excuse to try out a linux distribution. Unfortunately, my only experience with linux is limited to a few hours playing with a Knoppix cd I got on a magazine cover.
My question is this: Can you recommend to me a moderately easy to use, free to download linux distro? It doesn't have to be the very latest version, but it should work reasonably well on a laptop.
Thanks for any help you can give me.
mdwatts
03-28-2004, 11:19 AM
http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/ and http://www.distrowatch.com are good sites for reading up on distros.
Most distros are freely available though some such as SuSE either need to be purchased or installed via ftp.
Try Fedora, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian etc. and then decide which one you like and works well on your particular hardware.
XiaoKJ
03-28-2004, 11:28 AM
try running the knoppix on your laptop. see if it works. It may already me capable of installing!
(I dunno about this...)
For the new and trying, redhat, SuSE, fedora, mandrake and Mepis are part of the easier ones. Try reading the help file library and the web
try linux.org for some distro listings
Gentoo claims that it is also easy to use, but get help installing
u really need to read, i cant help much if u dont
ShieldWolf
03-28-2004, 11:30 AM
If you liked Knoppix, and it works on this laptop, why not do a hard-drive install of knoppix? Here's the "How-To". (http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install.html)
BTW, make sure and bookmark Distrowatch, it's a great resource.
Wow! A multinational "Welcoming Commitee". :D
cybertron
03-28-2004, 11:40 AM
Wow! A multinational "Welcoming Commitee".
Seems like that represents the linux community pretty well then:).
Ancisace
03-28-2004, 01:41 PM
Thank you for your help. This was exactly what I needed.
EnigmaOne
03-28-2004, 02:50 PM
My wife just loosened up about her laptop--seems the (what I call) shimmering effect (actually the scan rate) bothers her eyes to no end--and gave me the go-ahead to fool around with it a bit.
I tried the LindowsLive4.5 CD on it (mainly because I have it, but have been deliberately ignoring Lindows), but had problems with hardware detection.
I went with my favorite "full-sized" LiveCD distro (Knoppix) and found everything detected and usable--including the wireless card.
You might have similar luck with the latest iteration of Knoppix.
Ancisace
03-28-2004, 03:15 PM
I have a slightly out of date version of Knoppix that won't install from the CD (according to the knoppix.net website, anyway). I don't mind, because I will simply have to wait a little longer, is all.
MMYoung
03-31-2004, 10:11 PM
I'll put in a plug here for MEPIS (http://www.mepis.org) linux. It was recently chosen as one of the top 10 best Linux distros and I can attest to it's ease of installation. It's Debian based and it's a live CD (like Knoppix) but it has a much easier install than knoppix does (or at least so I'm told). Although laptop success has been spotty, more have got it installed than didn't.
Later,
MMYoung
I have had good luck with Mandrake 10.0 on my Laptop and Desktop now that they fixed the updates. Being new to Linux myself i was hoping for something easy to use and install. So far I have had no problems and all my hardware works so I can't ask for anything more than that!