I like Ubuntu and find it's easy to use. It's working on my E1505. To get your wireless working, you'll need to go to System>administration>network . Then click on your wireless card and select properties. Clear the check in the box marked "enable roaming" and input your network connection name and your 26 digit wep key.

I think you should try more than one distro. It's no good to find a distro that looks like Xp, Linux it's not Xp, it's different but not only in look'n'feel. Some distro is better for begginers (like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake) and other is better for advanced users (like Debian, Slackware, Gentoo) but the advantage of GNU/Linux is the variety of distros. In Windows you can only about home and bussines user but without any customization but in Linux you can find a distro developed specific for a lot of tasks.

So please, try one distro and if you don't like it, don't care, there is another suitable for you

Of course there is a lot of live-cd's with linux so you can run directly from cd without any kind of installation on hard disk also capables to save changes on a single file on a windows partition. It's a good beginning to test linux (like knoppix or ubuntu-live).

Hope it helps you, bye bye

Message Edited by kayser on 04-25-2007 07:15 AM

There is no answer for this question. This is like asking what is the best car made. Obviously Subaru is the correct answer but there is no better version of Linux as they're all basically the same except bundled with specific software to fit your needs. I think Debian is the best reason to use Linux. It's rock solid and does not hold your hand which lets you do more and also learn more in my opinion. People tend to favor Ubuntu which is what we deploy to all out Dell machines at work and they run nicely. I would suggest the following and try them all and see which was best for you: - Ubuntu/Kubuntu 7.04 www.ubuntu.com - Debian 4.0 www.debian.org - Fedora Core 6 www.fedora.redhat.com Good luck!

Hi, ubuntu and kubuntu are the same but in ubuntu the default window manager is gnome and in kubuntu are kde, but you can change it after install. Ubuntu are based on debian but it's not relationed because ubuntu are develped by a enterprise called canonical and debian are a community developed distribution. It is easyest to install ubuntu but if you wanna learn about linux try debian.

No, Debian or K/Ubuntu can't use RPM files. However if you have an RPM file that is not available as a .deb file, you can install a program called "alien"

$ sudo apt-get install alien

This program will take a .RPM file and convert automatically to a .deb file for you. Let me show you how it works and its very simple. Please note I have already installed alien on my system.


cwilliams@cwilliams:~/Desktop$ ls flexbackup-1.2.1-1.noarch.rpm

cwilliams@cwilliams:~/Desktop$ sudo alien flexbackup-1.2.1-1.noarch.rpm flexbackup_1.2.1-2_all.deb generated

cwilliams@cwilliams:~/Desktop$ ls flexbackup-1.2.1-1.noarch.rpm flexbackup_1.2.1-2_all.deb

cwilliams@cwilliams:~/Desktop$ dpkg -i flexbackup_1.2.1-2_all.deb [/code]

As you can see after I ran the alien command, I now have a new file on my desktop with a .deb extension. Then I run the last line command to install the new .deb file on my system. So basically you just installed an RPM on a Debian based system. However - Debian or Debian based systems have much better package managers than Redhat so I highly doubt that there is a .rpm file that is not a .deb file. Good luck!

Message Edited by Carlwill on 04-27-2007 09:18 AM

Try live distros.
Especially the free ones.

I like Knoppix.

If you are going to pay Linspire is a good LIVE distro as well as a good
overall distro.

YOu can get alien by typing "sudo apt-get install alien" in a terminal window. It'll look just like carl typed. Linux is nice. I like all the community support.

One word of advice, don't believe in those "X distro is for beginners" or "Y distro is for advanced users" comments. To me, a distribution should ease your life as much as possible. Myself, I rather spend my time doing things than doing "advanced tweaking". Also known as "fixing stuff that should work already". That's why I use Ubuntu.

For alien, you don't need to do the command line stuff. Both Ubuntu and Kubuntu have package managers that will show you what you can install. You can just select it from the gui. Once you install the distro, there is a packlage management ('synaptic' or 'adept', depending upon which desktop you chose) menu item under 'system'. I have Kubuntu on my 1501 and it is working nicely. There are severeal things you will have to do to get all of the hardware working, but it is not hard. I have Edgy, not feisty, so I expect it works even better now.

Yes - you don't need to use CLI but then why bother using Linux. You're only limiting yourself the experience of learning whats under the hood of Linux. Using alien is by no means complex as to compiling a kernel from source so if you have simple instructions showing you how to do so, go ahead and try it and avoid using the GUI. It just makes more sense to me to learn something new that can be applied if you're new to Linux.

I don't think anyone here said that you have start running shell scripts and all crazy CLI commands to use Linux. The statement was simply made because the OP asked how to get alien installed so he can get RPM's on a Debian based distro. Now obvioulsy a simple end user will not be installed and or converting RPMs or Deb packages so that is why a simple suggestion of learning the CLI was noted. It gets people over the hump of thinking everything is complicated when it's really simple. I too manage a DoD LAN and we recently swapped out all Fedora Core 5 workstations for Ubuntu 7.04 or Kubuntu 7.04 and it has been so amazing. Only 2 machines run Windows XP and of course 1 is BSOD right now and the other is slow for some odd reason...