[wellylug] copy of mandrake / suse

[jumbophut]

On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:10:19 +1200, Tristan Thomas wrote:
> If the newest Debian release is almost a year old, will I have any problems
> with wifi, dvd burner, touchpad, battery life / cpu frequency?
> 

Many of these will be kernel issues, and you can run the latest and
greatest kernel with Debian. Debian Sarge -- which will be officially
released as the stable distribution "soon" but can be used right now
-- optionally installs kernels from the 2.6 series.  You can even add 
patches to the kernel source and use make-kpkg to build it into a
custom Debian package.  (This is easier than it sounds.)

DVD-burning is limited by application support.  cdrecord doesn't
support DVD burning without patches (the author sells a commercial
version which does do DVD burning), and only some distros apply those
patches.  There are other apps, I believe, but you could find yourself
limited in that area.

Most importantly, none of these things are issues with Debian (Sarge),
but problems you are likely to strike with Linux in general.

As a previous poster suggested, booting into Knoppix will give you a
good idea of hardware support in Debian, before installation.  I
recommend it.  If you find support is patchy, try another distro.

-- 
Tony (echo 'spend!,pocket awide' | sed 'y/acdeikospntw!, /l at omcgtjuba.phi/')