Sorry Fedora...

(I posted this in the Fedora Forums. Bottom line: if you have a fairly recent laptop, I can't recommend Fedora, even though I've had some great experiences with it in the past on servers.)

but no networking is a deal-breaker....

I've installed FC6 and FC7 on several generic servers in the past, it's beautiful, it simply runs and runs.

So when I got a new laptop with Vista and decided to try a Linux distro, Fedora was the first one that came to mind. I downloaded the FC9 "live" version and all the critical functions worked, display looked god, could get on line, see the NTFS partitions...

I installed FC9 and the ethernet port no longer worked. I got it working after trying several things, did a yum update, and it broke again.

Again, I've had experience with Fedora. I LIKE Fedora, but it's more trouble than it's worth trying to make it work on my laptop (at least at this point in time.) I realize that it's more enterprise/server oriented than end-user oriented, and may try it again at some point in the future, but my time is finite and it's a major pain switching back and forth between Fedora to try solutions I can only find when I'm in Vista and can get on line.

The search for a laptop-friendly distro continues. Next stop: Debian-land

 

umm...what laptop?

 

Ubuntu has been pretty good. right now it is the most popular distro. They have a live CD as well. It is also as easy as eating pie to dual boot it with Vista or XP.

 

To be honest the most laptop centric distro would be Ubuntu.

 

Linux Mint I would say.

 

I think you need to try Gentoo. It has amazing hardware support.

 

I would just add that when you get a new laptop, it is going to take some time for the major distributions to catch up with all the changes in hardware. If you consider that hardware vendors provide drivers for windows and not for linux, then I think you have to admit that linux does a pretty good job of keeping current.

In your situation I'd say wait for the next release of Ubuntu which will be at the end of the month. You might be surprised.

 

Amazing hardware support, no doubt, but geez, this one sure as hell ain't easy or quick to install (though the LiveCD works just as well, and is probably the fastest distro I've ever used)!

 

Every OS requires effort from its user in order to function properly. Even in Windows, ethernet often does not work right off the bat, and a driver installation is needed. In fact, I can't recall ever having done a Windows installation in which the NIC was automatically detected.

Please don't go around bashing specific distributions just because you're unable to expend the effort it requires, or because your hardware is new and not yet fully supported by linux. Remember, Fedora is not a kernel.

 

Honestly, I don't believe that the original poster was bashing Fedora; he simply reported his actual experience. He did add that he really liked Fedora, but that he didn't consider it suitable for his laptop (at least for now).

Judging by his post, I'm confident that he will be keeping an eye on Fedora, and that he may decide to install it on the laptop as soon as he can get it to work reliably and without too much hassle. You cannot blame him for not wanting to spend his time trying to figure out if (or how) he might be able to get the laptop connected to the net with Fedora, can you? He may have better things to do, after all.

Anyway, I'm more of an Ubuntu user myself, and I'm trying to set up the wireless interface of a Dell Studio 17 laptop. I tried a few things with Ubuntu 8.04, but couldn't get it to work, and I decided that I wouldn't put too much more energy into it. I'm now running the Ubuntu 8.10 beta Live CD on it, and that works flawlessly. Therefore, I'll wait until the 8.10 final release arrives (by the end of the month), and see where that gets me.

 

By broke you mean... it still works in other OS's, right? I just ask because there's a bug in a development kernel recently that causes some issues, which is included in quite a few alpha and beta distributions. You're sure you installed Fedora 9, and not a prerelease version of Fedora 10, right?

You probably wouldn't be affected because some kernels and prerelease distributions are disabling that module until it's fixed upstream, which if you did install a Fedora, Mandriva, or Ubuntu beta or RC right now, would be why your ethernet might not work with them.

Also take that as a warning to be careful with anyone using kernel 2.6.27 release candidates. I think it was only introduced with RC3, and a temporary workaround was issued with RC7 or thereabouts, but I'm not sure of that timeline.

 

That may be it. Sidux, with kernel 2.6.26 seems to be working fine. Need to get the ath9K wireless working, but wired ethernet is good.

Sidux is pretty impressive so far, installed it to a 4G USB stick. It "feels" very quick, boot time is quicker than Fedora even though the stick is slower than the HD.

 

appended: The Fedora was (still is, haven't deleted it yet) 2.6.25, so not the 2.2.27 glitch.

Now I gotta get the wireless working. Ath9K drivers installed, seeing the router, but no ping to the default gateway even when IP address statically set. Packet count in/out of wlan1 0/0...

 

Also, try windows networking with Fedora

 

Dude, I don't like Windoze networking with Windoze!

FWIW though, Fedora running Samba seems to work well enough (at least for file sharing.) We do that at work, but I'd rather just use ftp at home.

 

The best hardware support currently out-of-box has new Mandriva Linux One 2009. Period .
Fedora 10 beta and Linux Mint 5 Elyssa are 2nd from my experience .

I agree. It's the best distro for beginners.

Try new Fedora 10 beta.

I had many problems with old v9 (never managed to work properly on my laptop), but new 10 is much much better .