[LUAU] Good distros for Dell laptop?

[Julian Yap]

On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 09:55 -1000, Clifton Royston wrote:
>   So I bought a Dell 6000 at the end of December as my last minute
> end-of-fiscal-year create-taxable-expenses item, since I really needed
> a laptop, and now I'm looking to partition it and put a Linux distro on
> half.  (I bought it with an 80GB drive to make sure I'd have room for
> two OSes.)  

I bought a Dell Inspiron 6000 around the same time.  Right now, I have a
60 GB drive, DVD burner (dual-layer), 512Mb RAM, default Wifi b/g,
slightly faster than standard CPU.  I have it set to dual-boot Windows
and Linux.

I'm looking to max out the RAM to 2GB and selling the 2 sticks of 256Mb
on eBay.

>   Are there any concrete differences which would make some distros
> objectively better to use for laptop, any variability with regard to
> ease of repartitioning, hardware support, APM, wireless support, etc.? 
> Or should I just pick any one that sounds good?

Main differences are the extra niceties and things you _don't need to
configure/install.

My experience:

Initially I installed Fedora because I'm most familiar with it.  The
install doesn't install the Wifi card which pissed me off because I
didn't want to spend an hour or 2 (or more) setting it up.  It doesn't
make sense to me that I would need to do that on Fedora a community
distribution on a centrino laptop.  If it was the graphics card or
something else, then I'd understand.

>   Ubuntu seems to be getting a lot of mindshare, but of course so does
> Fedora, so does SUSE...  I wouldn't object to buying a well-done
> reasonably-priced distro, if it's concretely better than the
> competition.

... Then I tried Ubuntu having used it before.  Wifi worked on install,
little things like the from multimedia buttons all work.  Might I add,
these don't even work on Windows install.  I was uninstalling lots of
pre-installed Windows Dell crap and then the buttons stopped working.
They're controlled by some Dell program.

Function key combinations all work (volume, brightness, etc...).  Would
these have worked with Fedora?  Don't care.

Laptop hibernation, suspend, stand by _all work.  I know with Fedora
this requires fiddling.  I usually hibernate my machine at the end of
the day.  Maybe once or twice the Wifi hasn't resumed the next day but
then a reboot fixed that.  No real dramas.

Before settling with Ubuntu and the gnome desktop, I also tried out
Kubuntu (KDE desktop).  Multimedia keys didn't work.  But mostly I
prefer gnome.  Mostly the feel of KDE with Konquerer I don't really
like.  Personal preference.  I'm looking to re-evaluate when 6.04 comes
out.  I'll add that you can run all your favorite KDE apps like K3b
(DVD/CD burner) perfectly fine on Ubuntu.

About the only thing that _doesn't work with Ubuntu is SD card slot.
I've read this is because it's supplied by Ricoh who isn't giving any
help to the Open Source community.  Minor inconvenience to me because I
have a digital camera which uses SD cards and it would be really handy
to just pop in the card.

Minor issues like the Wifi/Network manager is shit, boot up could be
faster, hibernate could be faster...  All plan to be or have been
addressed for version 6.04 (release in April) according to the roadmap.

If you try out any other distro or *nix let me/us know how you go.  I'd
be interested in knowing.

- Julian