I have just aquired a laptop that has no OS on it and do not want to buy another lisence for windows XP or anything and wanted to ask if anyone knows of some good Linux distrobutions.....I have heard of Gentoo and am thinking of that but in anyone differs in say please tell me so I can get this laptop to live again

My favourite distribution is Debian.



Q

You might spend a lot of time compiling applications on Gentoo, especially the big ones, such as X11R6. Some people will tell you that you'll get better performance that way, but I'm guessing you're not trying to run a web server on the thing.

I have RedHat on one of my home systems, but it's a very old release. I would recommend Fedora, Debian, or perhaps SUSE. One thing you will need to be careful of is hardware support, especially on laptops. Some components just might not work unless you buy the right hardware. When you get a digital camera, look for one that supports the Mass USB Storage standard, then it's easy to connect to a Linux system and you can just write a script to grab the files. Suspend support, modem, and Wireless LAN might also be tricky depending on what hardware you have.

In the end I chose Kubuntu - a Debian variation. I think it is very good and personally I am a linux noob....I cant install fire fox...i get the tar.gz and extract to my home folder but I do not know how to open it...please help me..

Maybe Knoppix is suitable for you. It's a debian variant which is mainly made to start completely from CD or DVD. So you can try it before. There are hundreds of already installed software packages. All included what you will know by name and what you need. The hardware is automatically recognized at startup, normally no need to give special start parameters. Knoppix uses KDE. It is available in the languages english and german. Of course there is also a very good hdd install script included. When you install it on HDD you will get a complete debian system with all the applications already installed. Works very well on my notebook. I highly recommend it. Watch out for the newest version 5.01 which should be available today or in the next days (the version 4.02 is 8 months older).

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

I am a fedora user myself but I would agree with the Kbuntu option. Easy for a first timer.

Easy enough to give it a shot. Just download the ISO and burn it to a CD/DVD.

Slackware or Gentoo

I've tryed to get Xgl working recently from the advice of doug reed. It's soo cool, but no luck..

~Thom

Forget Xgl for now until the packages come out. But if you want to try it out, get the Kororra Live CD. Amazing stuff.

I did aswell, but my laptop's monitor isn't supported, I don't think. I'll have to try it in college...

~Thom