[wellylug] copy of mandrake / suse

[Ian Sterling]

I've been fussing with debian over the last several days on my old
laptop.  I'm having one bugger of a time getting the wireless (fully)
working with my router.  (I got it so that I could surf the 'net, but
had ZERO access to the LAN.  Go figure!)  I'm getting more and more
disappointed as the week goes on and nothing seems to play nice.  I'd
put Win98 on it since it's an OLD laptop and XP slows it down, but
wireless under 98 has been a no-go too.

I //had// Debian running beautifully on it, but wiped it to put XP on
for me mum when I got a "new"(er) machine (which died a few weeks
later).  Now I'm kicking myself for not making a backup disk image
before formatting the sucker.  *sigh*

Anyhow, this is just a horror story from yours truly.  Don't let it
discourage you.  I'd suggest Debian or even Gentoo.  But if the
laptop's //too// new, you may have a hard time getting all the
hardware running.

My opinion for RPM-based distros is to go ahead and run Fedora.  It's
just getting better with time and has come quite a long way since the
days of Red Hat Linux 5.1 (when I started playing with Linux).  For
beginners it's pretty smooth.  And with YUM, updating and upgrading is
easily enough done.  (Still not as easy as apt-get upgrade in debian,
but getting there!)

Just my two cents worth. :)

--Ian...