Sunari Posted January 10, 2007 Share Posted January 10, 2007 I just formatted my laptop and im trying to decide if i should delve into linux, a buddy of mine suggested i start with live cds, but its myu understanding that the live cd likely wont have driver support for my wifi card or the integrated bluetooth. Is there any distro that would tend to have more drivers or anything? or should i be looking into making a seperate partition? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boristsr Posted January 10, 2007 Share Posted January 10, 2007 ubuntu should support your wifi (a lot of distro's don't due to strict open source policies), and a live cd allows you to very quickly and easily try linux. dual booting can be a pain, and with no experience you can risk your data. and a flat out switch is gonna be a HUGE shock to you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
killzone Posted January 10, 2007 Share Posted January 10, 2007 If it is your only computer, id use live distros, and run windows as the native OS. Just for the convenience, and so you can acclimate yourself to *nix. If not make it a linux machine, you can probably find a distro that will support your wifi if you look hard, and you can always SSH to it from your windows machine to play around. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted January 11, 2007 Share Posted January 11, 2007 It is damn easy to setup 'dual booting' (hate the buzz phrase) with Ubuntu. Install windows, tell it to only use, say, half the hard disk space. Once windows has finished installing install Ubuntu, just tell it to use "all available free space" and it will do all the work for you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anyedie Posted January 11, 2007 Share Posted January 11, 2007 It is damn easy to setup 'dual booting' (hate the buzz phrase) with Ubuntu. Install windows, tell it to only use, say, half the hard disk space. Once windows has finished installing install Ubuntu, just tell it to use "all available free space" and it will do all the work for you. I do that! only I dual boot Mandriva... Its great! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted January 11, 2007 Share Posted January 11, 2007 In my recent linux test one thing I noticed was that every distro I tested worked perfectly in a dual boot situation. openSUSE 10.2 and Fedora Core 6 are also worth looking at. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
twentydead Posted January 11, 2007 Share Posted January 11, 2007 ubuntu should support your wifi (a lot of distro's don't due to strict open source policies), and a live cd allows you to very quickly and easily try linux. dual booting can be a pain, and with no experience you can risk your data. and a flat out switch is gonna be a HUGE shock to you. +1 for Ubuntu. The actual Ubuntu cds are an install and live disc on one cd. Wireless should work out of the box under live (unless its a broadcom or something like that). Cool thing with ubuntu is that if you run live, and you like it, there is an install icon on the desktop. Very seemless installation. I've been running Ubuntu for over a year and its great (and easy). Lots of support. The most current "stable" version is 6.10, but the newest version (7.04 i believe) should come out relatively soon. http://www.ubuntu.com/products/GetUbuntu/d...direct=download Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted January 12, 2007 Share Posted January 12, 2007 The most current "stable" version is 6.10, but the newest version (7.04 i believe) should come out relatively soon. and the feature line up for Ubuntu 7 (as ever) is impressive. Some of the features do specifically aim to rip off MAC OS X, which I'm not so pleased about, but then Vista has basically done the same thing but Microsoft won't admit that as openly as the Ubuntu team has ;) Thanks to the superb work of Matt Garrett and company, we now have a very impressive usplash which is nicely extensible. We will review the entire boot experience and see if we can make it as seamless as the Mac boot experience, with clean transitions between boot stages. This spec will summarize our findings and plans. That quote is from the super-slick boot feature: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/slick-boot The full feature list: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/feisty Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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