Best linux distro for my laptop?

[Dojo2000]

So I've been dual-booting XP and RedHat 9 for about two years. My harddrive recently took a dump, but I managed to salvage my windows partition and image it to my new hdd. I want to dual-boot again, but I'm not sure which distro to use this time around. At the time, nothing but Mandrake and RedHat would even get to the install screen, the others like slackware would just stall, so I went with what I thought was the lesser of two evils at the time. It turned out that redhat worked pretty well for me because it automatically configured a lot of the complicated things on my laptop.

I'm looking for a distro that will work well--minimal manual configuration, and compatibility with my laptop, a HP pavilion ze5170. I'm leaning toward Suse and Fedora because of some of the things I've read. What do you guys think?

[MTMike]

I've been using Xandros 3.0 Deluxe (Debian based) for 6 months now and LOVE IT. It feels very much like Windoze so it was an easy transition for me since I'm too busy to spend my time figuring out crap.

My only complaints: I can't do some of my business stuff on it - Quickbooks, Adobe InDesign, Active Sync for my PDA, etc.

Deluxe does come with Crossover which can run photoshop and some stuff - it works, albiet choppy, but it works.

It also comes with a program called GIMP which is just as powerful as photoshop. It also has OpenOffice1.1 which can read & write Word doc & Excel & powerpoint files.

It's like $89 for the deluxe version (with Crossover) or $49 for the std. version and WELL WORTH IT imo.

http://www.xandros.com

I'm not sure if it will work with your laptops wireless hardware if you have/use that. My dad's Dell doesn't have a driver for Xandros to run his wireless network card - thats the only drawback for him.

[Dojo2000]

Thanks, Mike, but I'm definetly not paying for linux. I'm very familiar with linux and figuring out "crap" [img]tongue.gif[/img] I just leave the complicated stuff to my dedicated linux box running Slackware.

I need something that will support mounting my windows partition easily/automatically, make my volume and "function" keys functional, etc... I'm not so much worried about wireless because I doubt my current pcmcia card is supported by linux at all. Anything important I need to do can be done in windoze.

[Tru2Chevy]

I am used to red hat 9, but will prolly be running gentoo or suse when I get my laptop straightened out.

- Justin

[mike h]

why do you need the second OS? if you use windows XP there should be no compatibility or functionality issues. I don't understand people's beef with windows unless you have Win9x or ME. everything is desgned to work with windows and I have never had one blue screen ever in two years with XP Pro, i am really careful about what sites i visit and what i download.

about the question you wanted answered, I have no idea! [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[Tru2Chevy]

I dislike Windows because it's a microsoft product, not because it's a bad product....

- Justin

[Dojo2000]

I'm gonna go with Suse, but their latest version, 9.3 Pro, isn't available for download yet.

[Dojo2000]

I'm downloading the torrent of Suse 9.3 Pro right now, 5 CDs.

One of my roommates is downloading the DVD iso right now, too.

Can you say "no more bandwidth"?

[MTMike]

Originally posted by Dojo2000:
Suse 9.3 Pro

Let me know how that goes - I'm looking for a good quality free distro to offer to my clients as an alternative to Windoze.

I love Xandros but it costs as much as Windoze. I was willing to pay for it but others may not.

[Dojo2000]

Still downloading it. 3.5 GBs takes a while, even on cable :(