The most commonly asked question - "Which Distro?"

[EdCollins]

Hi, I posted back in August when introducing myself, and had some good feedback on starting with Linux. So thank you to those kind people Distros like Susie and Mandrake were recommended on the basis that they are good for beginners, but how do you know which distro will install no problem on your computer? I don't want to keep paying for books to get the discs and only to find that they won't install. In late July, I attempted to upgrade from Fedora 1 to F4 but it fell over on my laptop on the issue of the display/VDU. And I had paid money for the book. How do you find out which Distro will definitely install on your machine? My main Linux useage would be Internet.

[techieMoe]

... how do you know which distro will install no problem on your computer?

In short, you can't. No distribution will work beautifully on every possible configuration available for PCs these days. Sticking to the major ones means you'll *probably* have no trouble installing it, but there's no guarantee.

I don't want to keep paying for books to get the discs and only to find that they won't install.

Then don't. Download them instead. $.50 for a CD is a lot cheaper investment than $50 for a book.

[bigtomrodney]

Well there are a lot of hardware compatibility lists around, I'm sure the guys will be able to link you but I find that really the trick is - Linux has been developing so quickly over the past few years that it's gone from poor hardware support to pretty great. I used to sweat over nearly every piece of hardware I have, but now I use SUSE and it picks up everything I have no matter what machine I install to, new or old. I used to have crazy problems with my Monitor on my laptop (1920x1200 WUXGA) but that is fine now. Really its the kernel that holds most drivers so getting a really up to date distro should help. If you get a distro that comes out on a book chances are it's already >6months old. In Windows terms this is a blink, but in linux terms a lifetime. If you can download distros that's the best way, or if not there are a lot of sites that ship discs very cheaply. I once got 30 discs from ULNX.com for $24, though it took a few weeks to come. If you can get your hands on Suse 10 or Mandriva 2006.

[budman7]

As said earlier, you can't know which distros will install without a problem.
But there are some distros that have really good hardware detection.
PcLinuxOS and Mepis and Suse come to mind.
They can all be found at www.distrowatch.com

[bryansmith]

Laptop you say? Check out this link: http://www.linux-laptop.net/

Bryan

[jimbaloo]

You can get free discs from Ubuntu. TechieMoe didn't seem too annoyed when he reviewed it so it should be quite decent (not the review on techiemoe.com but the one on the forum where he had his epiphany). I don't think he tried it out on a laptop though, and he still doesn't like the x86 version.

[techieMoe]

You can get free discs from Ubuntu. TechieMoe didn't seem too annoyed when he reviewed it so it should be quite decent (not the review on techiemoe.com but the one on the forum where he had his epiphany). I don't think he tried it out on a laptop though, and he still doesn't like the x86 version.

Apparently how annoyed or not annoyed I am with a distro seems to be a metric for judging distros to some folks... I can't say it really makes much sense to me, but whatever works...

Just to confirm, I did not try Ubuntu (32 or 64-bit) on a laptop. I have the listings of the hardware I used in the far right column of the rants table.

[budman7]

A little off-topic

Apparently how annoyed or not annoyed I am with a distro seems to be a metric for judging distros to some folks... I can't say it really makes much sense to me, but whatever works... Confused

This just shows how much respect you get on these forums.
I think your reviews are great.
After reading your review on FreeBsd 6.0 I think I will try to install it again.