I have a Dell C-640 and i was thinking on running Linux Linspire Five-0 and was just wondering if it's a good choice for a laptop i heard there's thousands of diff release's out there and that's why i ask , or maybe there's a better driver friendly one somewhere. thanx
This distro with the newest version should be able to run on this laptop but before you buy, go to Linspire's website and do a hardware compatability search. Look for PC's and / or laptops, they should have a list of compatable PC's, laptops as well as other hardware. If your make and model is not listed, there still stands a better than average chance that you can install, load and use Linspire. The things that you should check in addition to your PC is all the hardware that your laptop has and has been configured for it. If you find there are issues with this distro or version of Linux, you may want to check out other versions and distros. Xandros Professional 4.0 is an easy transition from Windows and you can check out their website and hardware compatability list as well. Note, this version and distro of Xandros is the latest one and it's a commercial or non free version that comes with a lot of extra software as well as it's own Antivirus, Adware and File Protection system. It's a good bang for your buck and downloads, updates itself automatically on boot up.
The laptop is definitely supported, best thing you can do is get a live CD and have a go at getting things running without installing, Ubuntu I have found is actually good in that the live CD has gcc on it (a lot don't, which makes compiling drivers for unsupported network cards a bitch). Even if you don't want to install Ubuntu as your final choice (I don't use it either, I'm stuck on Arch now), it is great for finding out what is supported, and with a bit of digging can find out how it has been done by other distros. Usually a good source for install notes is Gentoo, but it doesn't have anything useful for this laptop. This is a bit sketchy and outdated (I think the suspend2 kernel it discusses is obsolete), but someone else using Arch has installed it successfully: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_Latitude_C640
thanx guys i started this forurm like a week ago and i got my old comp running and lots of other stuff too so thanks again for the help !
