[sf-lug] new to the group

[Adrien Lamothe]

kevin.kempter at dataintellect.com wrote:> ...  i am thinking about transitioning to a linux  system, or
> maybe partitioning my laptop to have both the existing  windows xp and
> linux, but i'm not sure how to proceed.
Hi Kevin,

Welcome to the group! I've been installing Linux on laptops for years.
The one distribution I've found to consistently work and install easily
has been SuSE. Specifically, SuSE 9.3. SuSE 9.3 is, IMHO, the best 
release SuSE has put out. I had lots of problems with SuSE 10.0. The word
is that SuSE 10.1 looks really good, but I'll have to wait and test it before
passing judgement. So, for your laptop SuSE 9.3, would be by far
the easiest to install. SuSE also comes with lots of packages.
SuSE is rpm based, a turn-off for many. Some people also don't
like the proprietary stuff (some drivers) SuSE puts in their distro. 
The amazing thing about SuSE is I've been installing it on different 
laptops since 1999 and it has always worked well. By the way,
the disk partition resizing feature of SuSE's installation is very easy
and works well.

If you want to use  a Debian based distribution, you could try the latest
Kanotix (release 2005-4). I wasn't able to get earlier Kanotix releases 
to work well on my laptop (an IBM Thinkpad T-20), but Kanotix 2005-4 
works fine. You can find Kanotix at http://www.kanotix.org. I'm sure there 
are other distros that will work on your laptop; the two just mentioned 
are the ones I'm sticking with because they were the least hassle to 
install and they've worked well for me.

Cheers,

Adrien



		
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