Off-brand Laptops?

[nononsense]

Quote from cable:

Ubuntu is SO BLOODY GREAT.

If anyone's interested in trying out Ubuntu with different hardware, remember there's a LiveCD which you can take to the store, pop in the drive, and run without harming the default Windows setup. The only thing I find I ever have to watch out for is the wireless card -- Avoid buying anything with a Broadcom card especially if you ever want to use wireless without buying a third-party PCMCIA wireless card....

Hi cable,

The livecd's are of course the way to start. They don't fill you in about everything though. Indeed, wireless is a point to watch. In fact, my current notebooks have Broadcom chips and run perfectly. I have tested Atheros, Intel and even TI with good results. You have to use the ndiswrapper driver with wpa_supplicant though.
Now don't think all this stuff is working flawlessly and smoothly with XP . It's pretty much the same story. Your AP also can play a major role. Want to read about trouble people are having with this: http://www.dslreports.com/forums/18

Be good,
nononsense

 

[bali_survivor]

Quote from nononsense:



.....

I am running now Ubuntu 5.10 (pre-release) on those without any problem.
.....

Just downloaded the live CD and booted one of the laptops off the CD. Looks great and seems to work all fine! Even found the wireless network card. Very impressed sofar, try running XP from a CD, LOL!

Some questions:
Has it a firewall build in
Can I run a windows program under it (emulation?)


Thanks
Maria

 

[nononsense]

Quote from bali_survivor:

Just downloaded the live CD and booted one of the laptops off the CD. Looks great and seems to work all fine! Even found the wireless network card. Very impressed sofar, try running XP from a CD, LOL!

Some questions:
Has it a firewall build in
Can I run a windows program under it (emulation?)


Thanks
Maria

The official release of 5.10 is for October 13 (or 16?). The livecd is OK but if you want a bit more, download the install 5.10 release candidate. In fact it will give you a good demo of the amazing 'synaptic' internet update. Your system will then pratically be very close to the final one. Don't forget to reinstall the final though.
Running windows programs on linux: Wine(free) or Crossover(commercial). These run in native mode and carry an impressive list of applications. Further win4lin and vmware for emulation.
Firewall? I didn't check, there must be several. I really trust only my hardware firewall, so I don't care too much about the soft.

Suse/Novell is also coming with a new release begin October. I didn't look at this one. My latest notebooks had some problems with the sis-lan under 9.3. That's how I came to try Ubuntu. This is the GREAT thing about linux. Once you know your way around, you are free like a bird.

Good luck to all.

 

[hcour]

OK, thanks for the input, guys!

H

 

[Choad]

Quote from Holmes:

Interesting on moving from Gentoo / SUSE to Ubuntu on a Fujitsu. Have been looking at the Fujitsu's and at the Asus (rather common here and reasonably priced).

I would be interested to hear of your progress of running Linux on a laptop. Need to find a suitable charting program...

Maria

Watch those aliases, "Maria"!