I'm looking to install linux on my laptop alongside windows. I've seen a site that recommends Fedora core 4 for my specific model. Would this be ok or is other distros good for it aswell.
There's a pretty comprehesive how-to regarding that here, with much more Linux-on-a-laptop-related stuff on that site. That how-to recommends Debian though I've no experience with that distro myself.
I don't like Fedora much as it's buggy, cluttered and slow. IMHO, Fedora gives Linux a bad reputation. That being said, I'd still rather use Fedora than Windows. If you want a Red-Hat-like distro, I recommend Mandriva. It uses RPM packages like RH/Fedora, has a very similar structure, but is compiled to run faster on newer hardware, runs KDE by default instead of Gnome, and the company fully backs and supports even 100% free/OSS version of their distro (titled "Community Edition"). In contrast, Fedora is compiled for an i386, uses Gnome by default, and is no longer backed or supported by Red Hat. For a newer laptop, you might consider running Mandriva 2006 Beta3, which isn't considered "stable", but in fact is. I've been running the 2006 beta since b1, and it's been rock-solid for me. Besides, 2006 introduces some really nice laptop-specific power management and wireless management tools that you could benefit from. When newer versions of the OS become available, you can easily upgrade the entire system to the latest build with minimal effort and no loss of data or settings. If you wanna see how Mandriva looks, click the "See My Desktop" link in my sig. If you find Mandriva is not to your liking, I'd recommend just about any Debian-based distro, such as SuSE, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Knoppix, or Mepis. Debian is a good distro with a great package manager, called apt, and it's flexible and easy to keep up to date. Although Debian itself has an outdated, n00b-unfriendly installer, each and every one of the distros I've recommended to you are based on Debian but provide graphical installers. In addition to what I've mentioned above, I want to let you know that Linux systems give you your choice of many different filesystems, all of which have their strengths and weaknesses (although pretty much all of them are better than NTFS). Ext3 is the default filesystem for most Linux distros, and it is a very solid & long-lived filesystem. Studies have shown that a system with an Ext3 filesystem can be hard rebooted during operation 300 times in a row without losing a single file --- that's pretty impressive! But Ext3 is fairly old and doesn't run as fast as some of the newer journaling filesystems such as XFS, JFS, and Reiser. I recommend Reiser for general use systems since it's tough, stable, and extremely fast. So what I'm telling you is that whatever distro you choose, I advise you to select the Reiser filesystem during the installation process rather than the default Ext3. Let us know if you need any more help. All the best, -AT
Thanks AT, i'll look into getting Mandriva 2006. Good info on file systems. I didn't know about their differences and was using the ext2 one for Mandrake 10.1. I'll wait till my connection is upgraded 4 times faster before I download .
