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JurgenWigg

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 20, 2006
356
0
Baltimore
I've tried Ubuntu on a laptop before, and found the wireless support leaving much to be desired... What other distros have you guys used with good results?
 

disconap

macrumors 68000
Oct 29, 2005
1,810
3
Portland, OR
I use Ubuntu on an old PC laptop. The wireless works fin (it's pcmcia, though).

I've tried out SUSE, but it just crashes the PC after install. Wasn't able to sort the problem out so I gave up on it and another distro I tried, I'll probably end up putting Ubuntu on that machine as well.
 

Queso

Suspended
Mar 4, 2006
11,821
8
The latest Ubuntu (Dapper 6.06) has support for Airport Extreme including using WEP encryption. Bit of a step up from Breezy.
 

ham_man

macrumors 68020
Jan 21, 2005
2,265
0
Xubuntu is a bit snappier on the old Dell that it is installed on than Ubuntu or Kubuntu, so I use that...
 

thesdx

macrumors 6502a
Jul 12, 2007
673
2
I've got a laptop running PCLinuxOS right now, which is soon to be replaced with a MacBook (ultra-portable if it comes out). Both PCLinuxOS and Mandriva are nice. All experiences I've had with Ubuntu have been bad. It doesn't work with anything.
 

KingYaba

macrumors 68040
Aug 7, 2005
3,414
12
Up the irons
Bumping old thread because I have taken a recent interest in Linux. Running Ubuntu (7.xx) on an old G4. Waiting for v8 for the Macbook Pro and putting XUbuntu 6.06 on a G3.
 

zap2

macrumors 604
Mar 8, 2005
7,252
8
Washington D.C
Ubuntu is my choice Linux distro, but I use Xandros on my EEE PC(because it comes installed, and works nicely for my needs)
 

martychang

macrumors regular
Sep 3, 2007
191
0
Ubuntu is merely decent to me, I don't like the full-sudo adminstration idea, I've never heard a convincing reason for why its existance, and while everybody says "SECURITY" I see more to suggest it's less secure than su w/ root when used correctly. Also, Ubuntu's fringe packages tend to be a bit buggy.

Debian is nice, but it's pretty old software. It's not that bad really, it's just annoying, I like having a recent version of VLC. Meanwhile, Testing/Sid lose the stability that makes Debian great.

I hate the way SuSe makes YaST the "one utility to rule them all." The fact that NVIDIA has a special SuSe guide for installing their graphics driver, and no other distro has/needs a specialized guide says enough.

I like Slackware, I just wish more people built packages for it, especially library packages. I can't put up with it in reality because finding certain libraries is such a pain, makes you wonder how the Debian people and such have them in repo if nobody can find them.

PCLinuxOS is sweet, I just wish they had a more diverse package selection. Including Ndiswrapper drivers is smart.

Zenwalk is like Slackware that can actually be used, Netpkg is a simple and effective package manager, though it has even fewer packages than PCLinuxOS. It's stable, fast, has out of the box multimedia, great wireless support, and is very up to date if you run a netpkg upgrade every so often. And yet, all the Slackware tools are still there if you want to do it the old fashioned way. This is the distro I gave to my mom, and you should see why if you use it.

Despite that glowing review, I'm currently moving to Red Hat type distros, CentOS 5.1 right now but I may go to Fedora 9 when it's released soon here. I want to familiarize myself with it some since I intend to go for the Red Hat Certified Engineer cert in the next year or so. I'll end up taking the Red Hat courses anyway, but I may as well start poking around now.
 

PowerFullMac

macrumors 601
Oct 16, 2006
4,000
1
I used a Ubuntu LiveCD on my iBook a few times, the Bluetooth support was non-existant (although that may vary depending on your Bluetooth hardware, U was usnig a Bluetooth USB dongle) and I am sure that you need command line knowedge to install apps, so not good for if you dont know about UNIX, although Ubuntu is pretty good, and there is Kubuntu if you prefer KDE to GNOME.
 
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