Good distro for laptop?

[scottmso]

OK, so I was using Slackware on my main system a while back, but I decided just to go back to Windows for many reasons, including the fact I thought it wasn't worth my time to use it and hardware/software compatibility problems. Now I think I am ready to try Linux again on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 600m: 1.5GHz Pentium M, 30GB 4200RPM HD, 512MB RAM, 32MB ATI Radeon 9000 Mobility, Intel Wi-Fi card....)

I need a distro to use for activities such as normal "office" stuff (with OpenOffice), watching videos, web surfing, and maybe a couple of Windows apps every now and then with WINE. I might play around with Linux and programming every now and then as well. It must support hotswap USB easily (storage devices such as thumbdrives, card readers, HD's) and support my Wi-Fi and Ethernet adapters, and have good support for "mobile" features (battery life, etc etc). Not much else I can think of.

Right now I'm thinking Fedora or maybe Ubuntu. Any ideas? Thanks

[enshum]

You should put Suse 10.0 on that list also.

ed

[JayMan8081]

I would recommend Ubuntu. It has a decent amount of wi-fi cards that are supported and is extremely easy to install. Plus apt is one of the best package managers I have ever used. They also have a great forum for finding help (if it isn't available here). HTH.

[soulestream]

Well my two cents

I have a dell 6000 with almost the exact same specs.

Slackware works great after some work. However, if your not wanting to work at it. Breezy Badger(ubuntu 5.10) rocks. I installed it on my laptop about a week ago. All hardware was detected.

Wifi (Intel 2200) set up on install
Speedstep works great
Hibernate/Sleep
all usb/firewire ports
My resolution/ monitor is setup great

After an hour of apt-geting I got mplayer, kino, and everything else I need.

The only note grub doesnt like my screen so when you initially install the screen scrolls, I used an external monitor and just F8 to switch and then switch right back gets you through the install. After the install I needed to change grub menu.list to make it not scroll. You may not have that problem on yours, but its a note. You can probably pass an argument at boot on the install and not have to go through that, but im not that smart. ;)

remember hardware is kernel specific so all distros will work, ubuntu just made it easy.

soule

[Hayl]

It shouldn't matter what distro as long as you have a 2.6 kernel, every thing should either just "work" or be "fixable" with very minor intervention.

[lnx_nu_b]

Running Ubuntu 5.04 on my Inspiron 6000.

Attempted to go to 5.10 while still in Beta and didn't have great success during install.

Would love to try slack, but completely lost when it comes to it. In time!

Good luck.

[DaijoubuKun]

I find that Slackware runs great on older laptops, it's pretty stripped (as far as what boots) and it's stable. the downside, RPMs (if you want to try the new openoffice 2 beta) but I found a way around that without have to compile the source code yourself.

in fact, I'll post that here, hehe.
open the RPMs in KDE (I can't remember the name for their little RPM program), extract the files and tell it to ignore dependencies. you have to do em one by one and run the program from a terminal (until you get all that 'k' menu stuff in. but it works... I love finding ways around these buggy RPMs :)