I have a tobshiba Vista laptop, and I have decided to set it free by making it into a Linux Laptop. I am a suse user on my desktop (Vista/Suse duel boot, I use vista mostly for gaming) and was wondering if there was anything I needed to watch out for in installing Linux on a laptop. (I will be clean whiping the vista off the laptop so it will be a linux only installation.)
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You should be fine for the most part. The biggest issue is driver
support. If you have a Broadcom card be prepared to work just a little
(Linux can work around a lousy vendor’s lack of drivers, thankfully) but
otherwise everything I do on my laptop just works (Dell D630) and on my
wife’s it’s the same (HP dv6000 or something) except for the Broadcom NIC,
which ndiswrapper tackles nicely.
Good luck.
DistortedHumor wrote:
> I have a tobshiba Vista laptop, and I have decided to set it free by
> making it into a Linux Laptop. I am a suse user on my desktop
> (Vista/Suse duel boot, I use vista mostly for gaming) and was wondering
> if there was anything I needed to watch out for in installing Linux on a
> laptop. (I will be clean whiping the vista off the laptop so it will be
> a linux only installation.)
>
>
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ab@novell.com wrote:
> You should be fine for the most part. The biggest issue is driver
> support. If you have a Broadcom card be prepared to work just a little
> (Linux can work around a lousy vendor’s lack of drivers, thankfully) but
> otherwise everything I do on my laptop just works (Dell D630) and on my
> wife’s it’s the same (HP dv6000 or something) except for the Broadcom NIC,
> which ndiswrapper tackles nicely.
Be aware that ndiswrapper is the last-choice option for running a
wireless device. After all, who wants to open a nice, stable Linux
system to running a Windows driver?
For Broadcom wireless devices, you should use b43/b43legacy if your
device is supported. If not, then use the Broadcom-wl driver from the
Packman repository. It is still closed-source code, but it does work.
It has a Atheros 802.11 b/g wireless-LAN, so hopefully that will be easy to support. I started the install at lunch, so I am sure by the time I get home I will be well on the way to installing.
Well I do not have a chance to check the wireless, but otherwise Suse 11.1 with GNOME was as painless as it comes.