Give Mandriva 2010 a try, it's equal to Ubuntu and does a great job with KDE!
On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 1:56 PM, John Jason Jordan <[email protected]>wrote: > On Sat, 7 Nov 2009 13:12:41 -0800 (PST) > Rich Shepard <[email protected]> dijo: > > > If I bring a linux live disk to the store, and they let me reboot a > > portable to test for compatibility, how can I tell if sound, video, > > wireless, Ethernet, etc. are supported? Do I open a terminal and scan > dmesg > > or is there a better way? > > I'd use an Ubuntu live CD. Ubuntu is probably the most plug and play of > the distros these days, so it is the most likely to autodetect and > configure hardware. > > Rather than poke through dmesg I am a big fan of real world hands-on > testing. If it works, cool. If not, on to the next machine. > > Sound: The Ubuntu live CD has that drumroll when it starts. If > you hear it, then sound is working. > > Video: Before going to the store look up the specs for the > machine to see what the native video resolution is. When you have > booted Ubuntu go into Preferences > Display to see if the resolution > matches. If not, move on to the next machine. Fixing video problems is > more pain than it is worth if you haven't yet bought the machine. As a > second consideration, lappies these days come with nVidia, ATI or Intel > video. ATI currently has a bad reputation with Linux. nVidia has very > good Linux support, but from everything I read they suck a lot of power > - not cool if you need to be on battery a lot. Intel gets good reviews > for power usage, but sometimes you can't get fancy stuff to work - > e.g., compiz. > > Wireless: If there is no ethernet cable connected, then Ubuntu > should show an icon with bars in the upper right of the Gnome panel. > (Sometimes the icon is a couple of monitor screens instead of the > bars.) Click on it to see if any wireless networks were detected. > Chances are excellent that there are a couple wireless networks > available in the store. You don't actually have to connect to them. If > Ubuntu sees wireless networks, then you know it found and configured > the wireless card. There could still be issues with WPA and other > stuff, but at least you know the wireless works at a basic level. > > Ethernet: It is unusual to find an ethernet device that Linux > does not support these days. Still, I would do lspci to see if the boot > process found the ethernet device, and then ifconfig to see if it shows > up. The output from those commands is short and can be read quickly in > the store when you have a nervous sales droid peering over your > shoulder. > > You might also bring a USB stick with you and write the output of dmesg > to it. That way you can take the dmesg output home to read it in detail. > > Of course, before getting out my plastic I would also Google my tail > off on the specific model to see if there are any Linux gotchas. > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
