Which distro for Dell M90 ?

I tried installing Mandriva 2006 today, there is some problem with graphics.
I downloaded and installed Nvidia's binary drivers, and it wrote something to xorg.conf, but xserver still wont start.

Soo any better distro out there ? SUSE ?
Which one is newer - SUSE 10.1 or SUSE 10 enterprise ?

 

uhmmm... what?

 

SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is newer, it was released just last week, but it's a commercial product, so you'll have to pay for it. If you don't know much about linux, Ubuntu or Fedora is probably your best bet.

The problem with Mandriva's X server could be easily fixable. Take a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log, there should be some error messages in the end of the file.

 

SUSE 10.1 and 10 enterprise are the same in hardware detection but Enterprise has mor support for server and have a lot of more application to make the user's life more pleasant.

find more information on google.

bye

 

Kanotix is pretty n00b friendly. Give it a whirl. www.kanotix.com
Even has scripts to automatically set up ati and nvidia graphics cards. Works great for me.

 

i've already tried latest suse. I'm not a linux guy and haven't tried to fix things but linux works fine in vmware (or maybe any virtual machine). Seems like a video driver issue.

 

SUSE is definitely one of most user-friendly GNU/Linux distributions out there. SUSE 10.1 (or openSUSE) is a free-for-all testing platform for Novell's Enterprise Linux offers. It has a few very annoying bugs, particularly with the updater. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is a commercial product, which you can download and evaluate for 60 days. You must activate the product to use repositories for updates.

Remember that SLED10 is an Enterprise desktop product, hence comes with less software than OpenSUSE 10.1 does. OTOH, if you want out-of-box XGL experience, SLED10 is for you. Otherwise, if you can live with a broken updater, go for OpenSUSE.

If you're not new to Linux and can read some documentation and books, I recommend Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu. I really like how SUSE has professional looks and polished interface for experts and newbies alike. I also admire their tools like YaST. But there are a few annoying problems that make me dislike SUSE. It runs slow even on modern hardware, and has unreliable repositories.

That said, try some mainstream distributions and evaluate for a week each. Only then you can decide which suits you and your hardware best. Oh yes, be prepared to read the f*cking manuals.

 

If you like Mandriva, remember where it has its roots! Red Hat's Fedora Core has plenty of user community support and much better package support than anything Mandrake/driva based. Also, I would not be surprised if the M90's graphics chipset hasn't made it into the nv driver yet. It isn't important to me so I haven't checked, but the M90 is a very new chipset so it may take a little bit of time to make it. In the mean time, you can use the VESA driver just to get things working. Also, you may want to get networking up and running with vesa driver, then update. At that point you may have support. One thing to remember is to have a boot disk all set for recovering a working xorg.conf file.

 

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_18897.html

According to Nvidia, Quadro FX 1500M and 2500M are supported in the latest binary driver.

 

So vesa it to get network going, then get the latest driver from nvidia.

 

openSuse works well. I wrote up a review of installing openSUSE 10.2 on the M90 here: http://www.kenjennings.cc/m90/M90_openSuse_10_2.html

I'm about to start the same procedure for openSUSE 10.3.

 

You should really give "Simply MEPIS" a try, it's been great for me so far.