Spec me a mobile distro...

bigredshark

bigredshark

bigredshark

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Evening guys,

Well, I've finally grown tired of vista on my dell laptop, and as it's my second machine which isn't used much I have a plan...

I'm going to aquire a 16 or 32GB SSD drive and put it in place of the HDD, then install linux on it - excellent eh?

So, I'm looking for a distro to do the job, I work with unix every day for work (combination of RHEL and solaris) but I've hardly ever used it for desktop stuff and my skills aren't top notch. So I'd particularly like...

something where the wireless will work straight off...
something that isn't going to need too much work to get down to fit on a 16GB drive
Something thats going to be quick on a core duo 1.2 with 1GB RAM

Ideas chaps???
 
Don't think you are going to have much work to get any distro (linux / windows / whatever!) down to 16GB!

Ubuntu is the usual warcry of the Linux guys on here - it's a good choice as it's very user friendly and as far as I am aware very easy to set up wirelessly!

Rich
 
bigredshark said:
Evening guys,

Well, I've finally grown tired of vista on my dell laptop, and as it's my second machine which isn't used much I have a plan...

I'm going to aquire a 16 or 32GB SSD drive and put it in place of the HDD, then install linux on it - excellent eh?

So, I'm looking for a distro to do the job, I work with unix every day for work (combination of RHEL and solaris) but I've hardly ever used it for desktop stuff and my skills aren't top notch. So I'd particularly like...

something where the wireless will work straight off...
something that isn't going to need too much work to get down to fit on a 16GB drive
Something thats going to be quick on a core duo 1.2 with 1GB RAM

Ideas chaps???
Click to expand...

easy peasy - Ubuntu, but to be fair, based on that criteria, any linux distro will fit the bill...
 
Yeah, I was a convert from Fedora, Ubuntu was easy to pick up. Fundamentals are the same, it's just specifics :)
 
bigredshark said:
you guys think ubuntu should be relatively easy to use, considering my experience is almost all red hat when it comes to linux...?
Click to expand...

if you can use redhat, you can use ubuntu... for me redhat made linux hard work at first (i used FC2) and i canned the whole *nix thing for a while because of it [that said, linux was a pig in general back then]...
Ubuntu though really was a breeze and made using linux as easy as XP, for example, it's a doddle...
 
Best check http://www.linux-laptop.net/ to see what has been proven to work on your lappy.

Its a nice resource as some poor nut has spent hours trying to get a certain bot of hardware to work and all you need to is read his howto ;)

As others have indicated ubuntu is great having personally come from redhat/suse usage from years back. Mind you I hate the ubuntu installer its a b**** to try and make it do anything advanced its targeted for the dummy user.
 
bigredshark said:
you guys think ubuntu should be relatively easy to use, considering my experience is almost all red hat when it comes to linux...?
Click to expand...

Yeah by far, I find RPM based distro's a pain.
I would grab feisty fawn now from before the offical release in 2 days, http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/feisty/beta/

I have been using it a while here and its been stable, quite a few little improvements over edgy.
 
Una said:
Yeah by far, I find RPM based distro's a pain.
I would grab feisty fawn now from before the offical release in 2 days, http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/feisty/beta/

I have been using it a while here and its been stable, quite a few little improvements over edgy.
Click to expand...

Feisty fawns RAID installer is/was badly broken. Wait 2 days THEN download the official release.

What improvements ? Improvements that cant be had in universe ?
 
Subliminal Aura said:
Feisty fawns RAID installer is/was badly broken. Wait 2 days THEN download the official release.

What improvements ? Improvements that cant be had in universe ?
Click to expand...

Er, whats the problem with your RAID install? Worked fine here...

The improvements are just little things here and there nothing major, yeah most can be had in universe but if your doing a fresh install now I don't see the point in doing edgy.
 
Una said:
Er, whats the problem with your RAID install? Worked fine here...

The improvements are just little things here and there nothing major, yeah most can be had in universe but if your doing a fresh install now I don't see the point in doing edgy.
Click to expand...

What version did you use ? As bugtrack has been littered with ubuntu feisty fawn RAID broken for weeks now.
 
Subliminal Aura said:
What version did you use ? As bugtrack has been littered with ubuntu feisty fawn RAID broken for weeks now.
Click to expand...

Erm the pre-release freeze, im hardly gonna be recommending the herds. Know raid was pretty broken then yeah, but nothing unfixable with a bit of effort.
 
Una said:
Erm the pre-release freeze, im hardly gonna be recommending the herds. Know raid was pretty broken then yeah, but nothing unfixable with a bit of effort.
Click to expand...

DUHHHHH ! No the beta

I Would be really intrigued in finding out how you managed to install feisty on a RAID array though. Not to worry if you can't :cool:
 
BillytheImpaler said:
Ubuntu is a good choice but if you're a Red hat man then why reinvent the wheel? Go for Fedora 6. It's an excellent distro.
Click to expand...

I did think about it, the reason I'm curious is all the unix I do is CLI only, on nameservers, mail relay etc for work, it's all red hat enterprise and I'm happy with how it works but I feel that an OS for everyday use on a laptop (with power management, wireless etc) is a very different thing from the stripped down to nothing server builds we use at work (hell, we remove the manuals from those builds).

Just thought you guys might think something else was better given you have some experience of desktop linux...

Thanks very much for all the feedback, I'm going to wait for the new ubuntu release and give it a shot. unfortunately I've found my hard disk is 1.8" so the 2.5" SSD drive won't fit, so I'll have to stick to old style hard drives for now :)
 
Subliminal Aura said:
DUHHHHH ! No the beta

I Would be really intrigued in finding out how you managed to install feisty on a RAID array though. Not to worry if you can't :cool:
Click to expand...

What raid controller and did you try doing a chroot install? Only thing I really had to do was to pass break=mount to the bootloader. The installer is broken for a lot of raid setups so you sometimes need to do it manually.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto#head-bb4e9a28fd1bf8c8ce1b42e2bb62d87d64e81f8a

The bug and the fix for dmraid,
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dmraid/+bug/93810
 
Last edited:
Una said:
What raid controller and did you try doing a chroot install? Only thing I really had to do was to pass break=mount to the bootloader. The installer is broken for a lot of raid setups so you sometimes need to do it manually.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto#head-bb4e9a28fd1bf8c8ce1b42e2bb62d87d64e81f8a

The bug and the fix for dmraid,
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dmraid/+bug/93810
Click to expand...

I moved back from using FRAID dmraid (ps you can install ubuntu dmraid without the chroot / mount loop devices nonsense) to generic linux software raid which is in fact faster and more efficient. The alternate CD fails to commit partition changes - I tried jumping into a shell with fdisk / mdadm to no avail whereas the same process works flawlessly on edgy.

Remember also that RAID is NOT supported by ubuntu.
 
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