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ianw1974
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Thought I'd ask all your opinions before I decide on my new install.

 

I currently have a Toshiba Tecra A8, Intel Core 2 Duo laptop with ipw3945 wireless and Intel HDA Audio. I'm after a distro that hopefully will just work for me, and also asking you to recommend something to me.

 

Right now, I have Mandriva 2007 installed on this machine, but the experience in installing was quite difficult, but I have practically everything working now after one month of running it, except the sound. I cannot get this to work no matter what I try.

 

Fedora 6, mostly everything worked except sound and wireless. I couldn't get the wireless working, but gave up too soon, so maybe this would be a contender.

 

Gentoo 2006.1, again sound problem, but never tried wireless, as I wanted to try and get sound working first before anything else.

 

Arch Linux also tried, but when applying updates, it borked the install when the kernel got updated but obviously not installed correctly and kernel panicked and I couldn't fix it. Sound also never worked with it.

 

Downloaded Ubuntu and Kubuntu and booted these. Everything except sound worked, and was surprised the wireless worked. Kubuntu had a problem when shutting down but this could have been the default kernel from the CD. Ubuntu was OK though.

 

I don't think Slackware is an option, well, basically because I want something easy to maintain.

 

So, give me your thoughts/ideas, and what I should take a look at now. I'm open to suggestions, on what and where to go next.

 

PS - I'm not dropping Mandriva completely, just on this machine, because it's a ball-ache of problems for me. Locking up randomly, not starting correctly, and always requiring five second hard power offs too often!

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OK, I'll give that a go. Hasn't kanotix stopped now in terms of development?

 

Oh, forgot to mention - as long as I can test the distro via Live CD before installing, as I'd hate to clear my current setup only to find it doesn't work :P

 

I'll get on to downloading kanotix and trying that for the time being, but anything else is also recommended, so keep suggesting chaps and chapettes.

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OK, I'll give that a go. Hasn't kanotix stopped now in terms of development?

Long or short answer ???

Short answer is yes but you just try the CD so far as hardware.... if it works Debian unstable will work (with the same settings and all) because there is nothing in kanotix that is not in unstable except configuration tools and the LIve part... but unlike knoppix which is a fine live distro kanotix was designed to be 100% Debian once installed...

 

If it all works you have a few choices... given the dev team all left when Kano announced switching to a *buntu base instead of Debian....(well it was as much indecision that split everyone being honest... )

1) stick with kanotix and if kano ever decides to go ahead I'm sure he will, he started it alone

2) switch yourself into SID... which basically means you lose the nice part of kanotix .. peopple used to ask why use kanotix and not just install Debian.... the answer is becvause then you have to keep SID stable yourself...

All kanotix ever did was tame SID, mix unstable testing in the best way and add lots of drivers..

When I say all that is far from trivial for all the Debian packages... even the most common 5000 ...

but you don't need all those, only what YOU use... (i.e,. 1 wireless driver, one sound etc.)

Indeed except for SW that needs to be updated (p2p, IM clients... basically things where the protocol changes) then it runs quite happily without doing anything... especially in a laptop scenario if you don't *need* the last OO etc. it runs fine and if you chose your IM client and p2p SW carefully then this can just be incrementally updated....

Basically use GAIM not Kopete etc. because the KDE stuff will pull in dependancies on lots of stuff that makes for big changes... whole libraries etc. and deps on those libs...

 

My laptop is still running a year old+ kanotix, haven't updated anything in ages... because for what I use it for there is no point.

 

3) Switch to Sidux... this allows you to switch sources and dist-upgrade. The present sidux release candidate is quite small (380MB) but its quite functional if minimal... for instance its only got OO writer but of you want the rest you just apt-get install openoffice.org

 

Sidux is simply just putting some nice stuff on top of Debian and taming unstable and making some sane choices on default installs. However the release is only weeks away so I'd wait for that instead of having to play with upgrading later... unless like me your interested in contributing.

 

 

Oh, forgot to mention - as long as I can test the distro via Live CD before installing, as I'd hate to clear my current setup only to find it doesn't work :P

Hence my whole reason for trying it... guess I covered that.

 

I'll get on to downloading kanotix and trying that for the time being, but anything else is also recommended, so keep suggesting chaps and chapettes.

Try any live CD... but bear in mind two things, the packaging.... and the percent to which the live CD install is 100% compatible with the base distro.... Knoppix is great but ... it depends if you want an installed distro tested through a live CD or a LiveCD...

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Just about the sound......

 

make sure you turn up and unmute all the volume sliders, i found my main volume control on my snd-hda-intel to be "Front". Give the latest 2.6.20 kernel a shot. If you're sure you've got everything plugged in right, and all the sliders up, it should work.

 

If it doesnt, file a bug on the linux kernel bugzilla and it should work in no time.

 

As for Arch, sounds like you installed with the old ISO, give the new one a shot: ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/other/0.8

 

James

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how about either dreamlinux 2.2 or pclinuxos 2007 rc1 or .93 if you prefer. Both are live cds.

Don't know about dream linux but isn't PClinuxOS based on Mandy????

 

The prob I found with my laptop was anything based on Mandy didn't work... always the same problems on booting PCMCIA through version after version... for quite a few I just turned it off in bios then when I found I needed the slot for wifi/card readers etc. I just gave up... (even thoiugh at that time I was still using mandy as my main distro)...

 

Basically for my laptop and Ians might be different it always worked on any Deb based distro like Linspire, Corel Linix and the old Mepis ??

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Some Linux distros have to boot with the "nopcmcia" switch to work at certain lappies.

Arch works just great on my 1-year old lappy (only the TI smartcard reader and the Motorola winmodem do not work). Everything else (hibernate, speedstep, special keys, wifi...) is working just perfectly. And yes, 2.6.20 is available right now (still at testing mode) which makes using virtualization (via the kvm module) asnap- provided that your CPU suports hardware-based virtualization.

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Nah, never used it, but I'm not really a suse fan from all the stuff I've read on it. soulse found a page before about my lappy, and Ubuntu so far is the one that seems to work the best on it. However, gonna try kanotix from CD and see how this fares, and maybe Debian Unstable if that is OK.

 

For the time being, I have my test desktop using Kubuntu for the time being, so I can get used to it, before I decide on what to put on my laptop.

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Kanotix should be a good choice as it is being developed on laptops, thus it has very good laptop support (no surprise there) and having Debian repos at your disposal is a nice addon. Arch and Ubuntu are some reasonable alternatives imho. SUSE... dunno about its performance on a lappy. If you want to use Fedora, I'd wait for FC7, where wireless is finally expected to work out of the box. And: they are very up to date on kernels, thus hardware support is pretty good. Downside: the support-time is quite limited (9-12 months).

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I've heard (on suseforums.net ) that OpenSuSe 10.2 (and SuSe distro's in general) work great on laptops.

 

I use OpenSuSe 10.2 myself, but for a laptop, I'd still say Linux Mint if you don't mind Gnome. If you like KDE, then OpenSuSe 10.2 is a pretty good bet.

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