Re: How to pick a distro?

["Ulrich Fürst" <heimwill@compuserve.de>]

James Miller <jamtat@mailsnare.net> wrote: 
> A couple of ways to adress this: 1) find a distro with a good support 
> community (e.g., Ubuntu is a newbie-oriented distro with a really
> active forum) and ask about your hardware there ahead of time. This
> presumes you know what kind of hardware is in, or attached to, your
> machine. What kind of NIC/modem, video card, hard drive controller
> card (if any), usb devices, printer. That sort of thing. Short of
> finding out all that, you could try a less involved option: 2)
> download and burn a copy of a live CD like Knoppix, boot from it and
> see if everything works ok.

3. Type the names of your hardware components into
http://www.google.com/linux
or
http://groups.google.com/grphp?hl=en
But watch out for the date of the question. A hardware with problems in
2003 can work properly now... You should find many threads about it if
you're hardware makes problems or is often used. But you see the
solutions to get it working. If you do understand them it's o.k., if
it's to complicated then you need other hardware or a distribution which
supports it (or someone to help). By the way: sometimes it's better to
change the hardware (e.g. software modems) than wasting hours and days
to get it working...

I don't know other distributions but e.g. with debian GNU/Linux you can
use also packages from other distributions (like rpm). 

4. Check sites like
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/
>  This document attempts to list most of the hardware known to be
>  either supported or unsupported under Linux.
This document is over a year old, so there should be much more
supported. So I guess "3." is the better solution.

hth

Ulrich
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