Sunday, April 18, 2010

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: Greetings from a total newbie

 

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 00:25, Scott <scottro@nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> A lot does depend upon the distribution. At present, some that are using
> 2.6.30-32 or so kernels may have trouble with Atheros cards, though by
> now, most of that is fixed.  Fedora has trouble with some ATI cards,
> especially if you go for graphic effects.
>

Well, I did mention Atheros :P I'd not heard about the ATI issues
with Fedora though, but honestly, I haven't touched Fedora since F10,
really... I've been on either RHEL or SLES at work, and Ubuntu
elsewhere for the last couple years... (outside of the class I teach
which I used F10 for last spring)...

> The Realtek wireless cards can also sometimes be a problem.
> However, the odds are that Linux will, as both Loyal and Jeff have said,
> be fine with whatever you buy.

Yep... Loyal and I are wise beyond our years ;-)

> If you used CentOS, which is based on RedHat's enterprise version, you
> might run into trouble--it's aimed at servers, and therefore, is slower
> to upgrade kernels and drivers, therefore, some of the newer hardware
> might be a problem.
>
> Ubuntu, Mint, Siddux, Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva--most of these should
> run on almost any hardware you throw at them.

The nice thing I've found with Ubuntu (and the Ubuntu based distros)
is that they make it a lot easier to install proprietary drives when
you need to. For example, the Broadcom wireless cards... Ubuntu 9.10
and 10.04 actually asked me during install (via the hardware-drivers
tool in the live environment) if I wanted to run the proprietary
Broadcom drivers instead of the open source ones, and so two clicks
and I was up and running on a Broadcom wireless card that had been,
until that point, a real PITA to get running.

Not sure if it's still kept up to date, but, you can check out
http://linux-laptop.net and look for any particular model you're
interested in. You can usually find install instructions, things to
watch out for, and tips for working around problems on various laptop
models.

Cheers,

Jeff

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