Help on my Laptop - Need Advice

[Redneck]

I am a total newb to Linux. Any and all versions. I take alot of digital photos and run XP professional on my home machine. I have tried to run XP on this laptop and it runs slow. The hardware is as follows: 550 Celeron, 192 megs Ram, 6gig HD, Not sure on video, USB, etc.
Well what I need to know is what is the best and smallest (with GUI) distro to load so I can take my laptop on trips to view my photos and load them to the laptop through USB. I will also like to network this Laptop to be able to transfer photos to my XP box. I would also like to be able to surf the internet using a wireless 802.11b.

Any Ideas.

[sarumont]

Putting Linux on a laptop can be a tricky thing. Check out the links and info we have in our Linux on Laptops section for some introductory help. Also, check out all the hardware that you have to make sure that it is supported (video card, 802.11b adapter and any other specialized hardware).

Other than that, I would suggest Gentoo for your distro. You can compile it all from Stage1 (thought it may take about a week) and have a quick little system. Check it out here: http://www.gentoo.org

Good luck.

[miky]

You're a noob and if you install gentoo, it could work pretty fine but it will take weeks and weeks for you to succeed your installation as installing linux on laptop is not very simple.

I would suggest you to install a mandrake in the first place, copy the dmesg file and the lspci output, then try to tweak the distro to optimize it.

Once you get used to linux, try other distros such as gentoo for example

bye

[rdeschene2]

I just recently went through the process of evaluating laptops for Linux, and I
would recommend at least a couple of things in how you approach this:

(1) download a copy of either Knoppix or the latest SuSE "Live Evaluation" CD
and try these out to see how well they detect and can setup your hardware.

- these are distros that install nothing (Knoppix) or little (SuSE Live Eval.)
to the hard drive, so you can just evaluate how they would work if installed to
the hard drive.
- as you are actively decompressing the files when you run off a CD like this,
it will be much slower than what it would be if installed to the hard drive.
- www.distrowatch.com will give you links and info on these distros

(2) http://www.linux-laptop.net/
- this is a good site with often multiple reports from people's experience with
installing different distros on a given make/model of laptop.

(3) the key chipsets that seem to be problematic are the onboard modem (many are
"winmodems", onboard WiFi card and video card IF you want 3D performance.

(4) IceWM is probably a better/faster choice than KDE. Personally I'm running
SuSE 8.1, KDE 3.0.3 on a Dell Latitude C600 (550-700MHz, Pentium III) with 256MB
RAM and I'm quite satisfied with the performance: web browsing, e-mail,
listening to streaming audio.

(5) I think starting with the 2.4 kernel USB cameras are treated as USB mass
storage devices, so you shouldn't have a problem there.