Re: Linux on HP laptop I've had a few days now of testing Linux, referred to by the PCLinuxOS crowd as PCLOS. I've had only a few small glitzes that were probably the result of me trying to do something I wasn't supposed to do. Linux is not Windows, but in some ways it's better. First of all it came packaged with OpenOffice, Firefox and a few other useful programs. I also notice it did not have any games at all. That's not too important to me but once in a while I do like to play solitaire. I searched the package manager and located a few card games for those boring times. Other concerns I had were over viewing movies and playing music. Once i figured out how to adjust the sound to come out of the earphones and not the internal speakers that worked out fine for me, as it also works with my external speakers for those time I want to share a movie. Albeit, movies on a laptop are kind of a tight squeeze for two people to watch at a time. Next was the issue of it not mounting the Seagate 500GB HDD. Solved that, bought a terabite external. I spent the last day and a half transferring files from 2 externals and the windows partition on the laptop, all onto the TB. It worked in Linux right out of the box, so I'm thinking there might be an issue with the file system on the Seagate. Except for occasionally needing to use Windows for some things, I'd probably make a complete transformation to the Linux environment. OTT, I own too many Windows based programs to totally scrap the system.
I've discovered the hard way that newer HP laptops can be a bear when it comes to installing linux distros. My DV6000 class machine flat out hated Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, as well as PClinux, Mint, and Sabayon. But success came at last with Mandriva 8.0 which recognized my USB wireless without a hitch. Still have a few minor issues to fix up getting everything talking properly in my mixed enviro, but so far it's looking very good. Since Mandrake was the very first distro I ever tried years ago, it's kinda nice to use it again and it's much easier to wotk with these days tha it used to be.
I'm doing about 98% of my computer time in PCLinuxOS now and 100% of my online time is with Linux. I'm wishing more and more I would have allocated more of my HDD to Linux, not quite ready to reallocate partitions yet though as I keep just about all personal stuff on externals that I can access from windows or Linux. We had some friends over tonight, the guy is a tech type, and I was showing him my system, he said he'd have to take a second look at Linux since the talk is MS is planning to drop support for XP in a year or two. He really got a kick out of that thread about the vista source leaked. He asked me to send him the link to it. Glad to see more Linux folks showing up here. With all the problems I had finding a Linux release that would work right on my HP laptop, I almost gave up. Had it not been for some real annoying issues I was having with windows, I'd probably have given up, but the time spent testing was worth the trials. Every type of file I've had to run I so far have found the right free download I needed to run it with. Just today I had a rar extension compressed file I couldn't uncompress. I started the package manager and found what I needed and within minutes I had the file uncompressed and was running it.
