On 8 Dec 2004 08:00:35 -0800, XXXX@XXXXX.COM staggered into the
Black Sun and said:
Mandrake, but that's just my personal preference. YMMV as always.
If you want combatability information, Google for "Linux $LAPTOP_MAKE
$LAPTOP_MODEL_NUMBER" and look up your laptop's make and model on
http://linux-laptop.net/ and http ://tuxmobil.org/ . If you'd posted
that information previously, someone could've replied with "Yes, ACPI
works on the Foobar 9000 laptop with kernel 2.6.7 or higher." As it is,
you'll have Search The Fine Web (or post your laptop's make and model#.)
Compiling a kernel on a modern machine is not a huge chore, since you
can find out everything you need to know about the hardware with "lspci
-vv". If you want something that looks pretty and works similarly to
Windows, run KDE 3.3 with all the eye candy enabled. If you want
something that's fast and doesn't use a lot of CPU/RAM, run fluxbox.
You must decide whether you want "pretty" or "insanely fast"; the kernel
makes very little difference here. Every distro includes a choice of
window managers/desktop environments. Mandrake's default is KDE,
Fedora's default is GNOME.
The processor should be supported without problems with a recent distro.
If you meant "will the built-in 802.11b card work on Centrino laptops?",
that's a different story. IIRC, you'll have to grab the 'Doze driver
and use ndiswrapper to load it. Google knows more about this topic than
I do. HTH,
--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / Hire me!
-----------------------------/
http://crow202.dyndns.org/ ~mhgraham/resume