Best distro for a laptop?

Fenster

I've already made a few posts about my woes with my laptop. I learned Linux on Fedora 2, but on my laptop its starting to annoy me. It does *not* like custom kernels and something or other tends to not work while running one (if it even compiles at all!), so between that and a few other things-things like the fact I use Fluxbox-I'm thinking its time to put a new distro on my laptop. I've shortlisted the following:

Gentoo
Suse Professional (€80 in Easons with a rather thourough guide book, for the sake of having it. I'm not a fan of the Personal version, but I'm told the Pro one is pretty good)
Ubuntu
Yoper

I gather Yoper is a bit slim, but as this is a laptop I'm looking at I'm after speed and performance.

What say you, the masses?

Capt'n Midnight

Knoppix 3.6 supports Centrino WiFi is that's any use - does the distro you are looking at support all your hard ware.
Both Umbutu and Knoppix are based on debian.
You can use different desktops in Knoppix too, but I haven't tried.

Fenster

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Knoppix 3.6 supports Centrino WiFi is that's any use - does the distro you are looking at support all your hard ware.
Both Umbutu and Knoppix are based on debian.
You can use different desktops in Knoppix too, but I haven't tried.

The hardware in my laptop is pretty generic, so I don't think that's an issue, in fairness.

I don't have a Debian disc and I don't want to go downloading another distro, so its Ubuntu for moi.

I'm not really a fan of Knoppix on my hard drive. Yeah, its a very nice out of the box distro, but its KDE-centruc, and I'll be using Fluxbox, which means I'll miss out on a good bit of what it has to offer.

EDIT: I've decided sleep is for the weak and went ahead with Gentoo.

tck

i had similar issues with an old laptop

ubuntulinux.org sorted it out, i'm getting a good few shipped to me for free (thats if u dont have ADSL) - i can post you a copy

OfflerCrocGod

Suse 9.2 is just around the corner. You could try the Live discs which have been released.

Big P

there is none. As long as you compile your options for your laptop into your kernel you have the exact same end. There's really no difference. Myabe if you want to use your wireless card by default with good encrpytion breaking proggies you could use debian but meh otherwise.

bminish

Gentoo is good on a laptop.
Yes it takes a while to setup but the instructions are very good and you will end up with optimising almost everything for your hardware.
You will also learn lots along the way and once you are finished have a nice solid linux installation that runs quickly and has the minimum of bloat since you are only installing the bits you want.

.Brendan

Fenster

I gave up on Gentoo. I just couldn't get it to work.

Fobia

Hi,
slackware and knoppix are both ok for laptops, people seem to be talking alot about wireless stuff though.....if you're only using it as a router or whatever then try me2000, www.me2000.org , but knoppix would be the safest bet if you arent too familiar with linux systems.

good luck,
que

Mutant_Fruit

I'll be getting a laptop soon, the G505 (or something like that) from dell. It has a centrino chipset. and i've heard that sometimes there are problems getting the wirelessness working correctly in linux. Is this true, or should i have no problem. I'm planning on Debian with the sarge installer. Or would gentoo be a better bet, as was mentioned 2 posts ago.

Also, are there any guides out there for configuring linux for power-saving to prolong the battery life, or is that automatic?

tomk

The Linux drivers for Centrino wireless chipsets are still pre-beta AFAIK, but they have come directly from Intel so they're your best shot.

Assuming your new laptop uses ACPI for pwer management, have a look at this.

I'd go for Debian myself - works great on my laptop.

Capt'n Midnight

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Knoppix 3.6 supports Centrino WiFi is that's any use - does the distro you are looking at support all your hard ware.
Both Umbutu and Knoppix are based on debian.
You can use different desktops in Knoppix too, but I haven't tried.

.
Only thing missing from 3.6 was VNC to manage the windows boxes, but apt get sorted that out..

gravious

Fenster wrote:

I gave up on Gentoo. I just couldn't get it to work.

I had Gentoo working on my HP laptop, I never got it working on my desktop. It took an age to install (mainly due to the compiling and recompiling) but now I've got Ubuntu on it and it works sweeet. From what I can tell as well, they seem pretty commited to getting laptop support working smoothly. You need broadband for Gentoo I reckon or to keep current on any developments in laptop support for Ubuntu or Fedora. If you really want to get Gentoo working I'll give you a hand. [The coherency of my post is inversely proportional to the hour of morning that it is when I'm posting it.]

Sarunas

see if freebsd 5 supports you wireless card: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/hardware-i386.html#WLAN, its wort giving a shot if it does.

Fluxbox is that far away from you on freebsd, cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/fluxbox-devel; make install.

just my two cents