What Linux Distro for Inspiron 8600 Laptop?

[dude8604]

I want one that's reasonably user friendly, and works well with laptops. It would be great if it had wireless LAN support. Ability to play 3d games is a plus. Please let me know what you recommend. Thanks.

 

[drag]

Well I don't know what distro would work best for laptops, but....

check out this site

It has 4 or so examples of people installing linux on a I8600 laptop. Read thru those and then you can get a feel for what you need to do.

Other then that "user friendly" distros are: Fedora/Redhat, Mandrake, Suse

Fedora is business oriented, Mandrake is bent on good home desktop, Suse is about new technology or something like that.

Just install whatever on it, and when you run into a problem see if that website can help you out.

Laptops can be a pain because each manufacturer likes to put twists and weird features on otherwise normally common hardware, and not tell anyone.


As far as wireless stuff goes, I don't know if you have a built in wireless card built in or not.

but if you haven't got a card and are looking to buy one, then check out here and make sure you buy one that is compatable.

Getting one thats well supported with open source drivers will make your job a 150% easier then dealing with semi-compatable stuff. (edit: also check out long it's been supported. If it's something brand new in the last year or so, then their is a chance that the distro your using may not deploy it out of the box. Look at what steps you need to go thru to get stuff working.)

 

[Chrono]

I'm using Mandrake right now on my inspiron 8600.
It's working great actually.

 

[mrweirdo]

I've got teh linux distros now i just need a laptop and i dont have the money to buy one lol

Anyways Redhat seems to be a good start even though its outdated compared to some of the other distros

 

[drag]

I just bought a used laptop and it got here a couple days ago. A gateway 400 vtx, a business model.

First I installed Fedora on it. And that went well.

But I am a debian user and that's what I am comfortable using. I had to pull the Xfree86 server stuff for 4.3.0 (which comes standard on most new distros) from experamental. Seems to work ok. The touchpad worked right off of the bat, but I had to set up some weird stuff with the synaptic drivers and "event" mouse drivers to get control over stuff like double tap timings, different speeds and acceleration among other things.

I had to use the acpi patch to get all the extra power features working properly (proccessor throttling, fan control, suspend etc etc). I am also using kernel 2.6.1. It worked fine before, except the fan kept on constantly and it's pretty loud.

Everything works perfectly except for 1 thing, and it's very irritating:

The Chipset is a intel 855gm. It comes allotted with 8 megs of ram off the bat alloted to the video, and it has a extra feature to allow the computer to dynamicly allocate more ram to the video card.

Plus you can't specify screen resolutions, the bios does that. Of course the drivers they made for windows allows you to change this, but they don't make proper drivers themselves and don't realy help out developers much. so that sucks.

I am stuck with 800x600 resolution. The max "native" resolution is 1024x768 with 16bit colors. I am trying to do a bios update and see if I can fix the Bios bug that is prevent me from using the proper resolution.

 

[dude8604]

Originally posted by: Chrono
I'm using Mandrake right now on my inspiron 8600.
It's working great actually.

Do you have built-in wireless? Does it work? I have a Truemobile 1300 802.11b/g mini pci card.

 

[TheDebater]

I have no idea if its decent or not but Lindows.com has a laptop distribution supposedly with lots of support for wireless etc; it might be worth looking into.

 

[dude8604]

Originally posted by: TheDebater
I have no idea if its decent or not but Lindows.com has a laptop distribution supposedly with lots of support for wireless etc; it might be worth looking into.

Yes but it's $40 or so. Linux is good because it's free.

 

[TheDebater]

good point

 

[TonyRic]

the truemobile b/g card is a broadcom based card. Linux does not support it directly, however, using the Linuxant driver wrapper from www.linuxant.com it will work great. A friend of mine uses that wrapper on his 8600 and I use it on my Compaq with the Linksys g pcmcia card and it works wonderfully. Best $20.00 I have spent.

 

[civad]

Yes but it's $40 or so. Linux is good because it's free.

Um.. free does not mean free as in beer... wth...there have been n no. of discussions on it before.
My advise to you: download a few distros, give them a try. Choose the one (s) you are most comfortable with. The DO make it a point to make a small $$ contribution to the distro (even if it's as little as $5!).

Speaking from personal experience.

 

[afrosheen]

Actually don't waste your money on Linuxant. Ndiswrapper works just fine as long as you're willing to spend some compile time.
In Mandrake 9.2 on this Inspiron 8600, I had to install kernel 2.6.2.x from cooker first (well it's not necessary but is a good idea), then rebuilt the kernel to enable full acpi and apm functions. Nothing says love like a battery monitor working in KDE on a brand new laptop. Rebuilding the kernel wasn't much of a hassle, I started with Mandrake's already good config file in /boot and tweaked all the acpi and apm settings, saved it, and did the standard kernel recompile routine. Now my fan cycles itself just like it should, battery monitor is perfect, (it knows if it's using AC power or Battery), cpu autothrottling works, it's just great.

About the driver...well another great thing about this rebuilt kernel is that ndiswrapper is supported in it. After downloading the ndiswrapper package and the Broadcom drivers (which will unpack under Wine btw), I ran the install script. It asked for the location of the windows drivers, which I pointed at, and it just worked. Everytime I reboot now wireless is up and listening. I couldn't believe how painless it was. Shocking, really. ACPI and APM were alot more hassle than ndiswrapper was.