Mepis, Old vs New laptops

I'm still abit wet behind the ears with linux, though I have plenty of novice experience with it for years, doing simple things in shells, and even playing with a distro or two, but didnt really have a PC I could keep it on untill now.

Well after trying several of the popular distributions of linux on my toshiba 1800 series laptop, all failing in one way or another (generaly, they either couldnt get the networking working, cardbus/wifi card, or they couldnt get their updates and/or packages installing after the main install. A few had video dificulties) I saw that SimplyMepis favored hardware support, not to mention offered a cleaner design while other distros tried to grab its users with as flash GUI as possible. The install was clean, no strange errors, all my hardware was detected and my dlink wifi card was active after install. Didnt even have problems with configuring my encryption code.

So if your looking to dump linux on a dated laptop, keep mepis in mind. On the other hand, while I only used the LiveDVD part on my dell 1505, it didn't seem to detect the lcd to well. That is, I had high color and high resolutions, but the highest res was 1280x960, my lcd is 1680x1050 widescreen. Also it detected but didnt have a proper driver for the intel wifi chipset that is in the laptop (wich I belive is a new chipset. The driver on the dell driver cd is for a 2xxxx and I needed to download a 3xxxx series driver from the website) so brand new laptops might need some work. ^^

 

On the E1505 Ubuntu (latest 6.06 LTS) should recognize and configure your 3XXX wifi card correctly (it did mine). Also, if a Debian based distro, which both Mepis and Ubuntu are, doesn't detect your screen correctly you can always try dropping into the CLI and running "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" (assuming it's using Xorg rather than XFree86) and setting it up manually.