what distribution for a dell e6400?

i have used linux a few years ago so I am not up to date with the ditros. what do you guys suggest? I am looking for:

- hardware compatibility
- ease of installation
- i want to run Wine to use office 2007 and possibly a few other win programs
- this is for dual boot
- i want to install it via USB, no cd.
- possibly not to lose too much battery life so i need to undervolt, etc

are there other things i should consider? I don't do gaming or any other specific tasks, no programming so I don't think I need anything too advanced. what are the things to consider when choosing a distro?

thanks!

 

For ease of install, you should probably go for one of the more beginner-orientated distro's like Ubuntu or Linux Mint (or one of their derivatives). Both are very easy to install off USB using Pendrivelinux. Hardware compatibility shouldn't be all too problematic either, though the Dell wireless card might cause some issues. It shouldn't be overly difficult to sort out though.

Office 2007 through Wine might be difficult. I just took a brief look, but it seems Wine doesn't like it too much. I've found the Openoffice suite to be a great alternative, but if you really need MS Office why not use it in Windows (I assume you'll be dualbooting with Windows?)

Battery life isn't great in most Linux distro's, but Powertop seems to help and with various tweaks you probably shouldn't lose too much or even gain a bit.

 

Hi there, Sir Punk.

I have an e6400, slightly different configuration than yours. You can see the details in my sig. I started out with Ubuntu and haven't had a reason to move on.

My experience with hardware compatibility is that Ubuntu works fairly well out of the box. It recognizes my wireless card (I use the Dell one), GPU (NVidia), and all the ports, keys, and buttons. I had to open keyboard options and check a box to use my windows key. Also, toward the end of the 12 months I was using 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), sound gave me problems but with 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) my volume buttons and microphone are working again.

Although I've basically never used my Windows installation for comparison, my battery life (56Wh) seems shorter than it should be: about 3 hours. I'm going to check out droes' recommendation of Powertop.

I recommend you try out at least one Gnome based and one KDE based distribution. I've looked at three flavors of Ubuntu and at Fedora. You've surely seen lists of the most popular easy-to-use distros. They're all over the place. For example, the Register is finishing up a short series for people making the switch.

Once you've narrowed your choices, take advantage of the Live Desktop feature of Linux distributions to take a look at them and test them against your hardware. It's not a 100% accurate way of testing compatibility, but should indicate what will be working.

One more thing to consider is how easy it is to upgrade your distribution to the newest version. I gather Ubuntu has had some trouble with this in the past. My last two-step upgrade from 9.04 through 9.10 to 10.04 took a long time, but it went fairly smoothly. There was a momentary graphics driver problem, but a simple reboot allowed it to fix itself.

Edit: Oh and to address your other criteria, Ubuntu is easy to install and has instructions on the download page for how to do so with a USB key. Most major distributions should have live desktop features in their installers and sophisticated, easy-to-use installation programs. I haven't used WINE, but there are packages based on both the latest stable release and on a more recent release candidate in the Canonical repositories.

 

Hi OP, I second what a previous poster mentioned. I would recommend Ubuntu and Mint 9 Distro. I'm a Linux Noob and I think Mint 9 is flat out awesome. It's literally a full featured OS that includes Flash as well as MP3/MP4/MOV support. It comes also with Compiz pre-installed.

If your looking for Linux on training wheels I would suggest Mint over Ubuntu. I started a Mint 9 discussion thread.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/linux-compatibility-software/488506-mint-9-discussion.html

 

Another thought: I've had trouble with suspend and hibernate under Ubuntu. They worked when I first installed 9.04, but broke after six months or so. I haven't tried to fix them yet. This is another feature to watch for, but may be difficult to test before fully installing the OS.

 

thanks alder, I have installed Mint because I wanna limit my time tweaking things. Of course there is somewhat of a learning curve, let's see if I can get past the tweaking. So far I like it but firefox has crashed on me a couple of times and there is one website that makes it really slow and unresponsive. ( Ultime notizie sportive - La Gazzetta dello Sport) also with the skype video call it's either full screen or very small and I haven't found a solution.

I tried powertop but it's not that user-friendly. I need some other program to undervolt that has a GUI and it's fairly simple.

I also got wine installed but the program i need to run doesn't work. oh well.

 

That's great. I hope you have a great time using it. I haven't tried out Mint myself, but I hear it's a well-made distribution. Most instructions you find for Ubuntu should also work for Mint, as I'm told it tracks Ubuntu releases closely.

For your Windows program, another thing to consider is installing a virtual machine on Mint and running Windows inside that. I do this for iTunes using VirtualBox. I get Vista running in a window and can use my Linux programs and my Windows programs at the same time.

I'm sorry to hear Firefox is giving you problems. Your sport gazette doesn't slow down my Firefox installation. Have you updated all the software on your computer? You can always try another browser like Opera or Chrome.

When you have problems, don't be shy about asking at the program's web page or on the Linux Mint forums. If no one can help, you can file a bug on the appropriate bug tracker and help improve the program. Many people on the help forums wont be any more knowledgeable than I am (about as smart as a google search!), but often someone will have had your problem before.

Enjoy!

 

Welcome to FF, LOL. I'm not a Google Chrome fan but it's ridiculously good in Mint 9.