Thanks Bill: For the advice on the Dell laptops. a year ago I bought an inspiron with RedHat preinstalled but it ran really badly. I had to return it. On Sunday 11 February 2001 18:37, you wrote:
I haven't read Linux Mag yet (UK or US?) but you should be particularly careful if you want to run SuSE as Dell laptops are much happier with Red Hat - I am installing RH on my Inspiron (thanks to some useful web resources) because it works. I can't install SuSE - the pcmcia support screws up the installation, I have instructions for coping with this with RH but no clue with SuSE. Also X works under RH as there is a config file (and appropriate server) available, but no support in SuSE. I might be able to work around these problems, but I don't know enough yet :-( This is unfortunate as in my opinion SuSE is much easier to install/maintain than RH, yast makes life much easier, and I hate
SuSE's desktop is more stable and with the professional version I get all the software I need. What I am really hoping for is that someone can say: "I run SuSE 7.0 on an IBM 390 thinkpad (for example) and everything works". Many on this list have given me very good advice. However when I look at the specifications for certain Laptops I can't figure out if they have a Winmodem. They will say 56k .V90 or 56k .V90 integrated. I think the integrated is a synonym for winmodem. That's the real sticking point; the resellers and some of the manufacturers are not sufficiently explicit in describing the installed modems. I made two discoveries about Linux on the desktop: Linux's spellcheck will correct arcane words like Phthalate, moiety, isomorphic, benzoyl, spectrophotometric etc. etc. M$ Word does not. Both Kspread and Gnumeric correctly round numbers but Excel does not. There are also other important reasons why I really want to get Linux on a laptop but I won't elaborate on them here. Thanks for the help. -- Cheers, Jonathan