So I have a dell e1705 with a core 2 duo (1.73 ghz), 2 gigs ram, 120 gb 7200 rpm hd. What linux distribution will actually work for this setup? Fedora 7 live cd crapped out on me and hung and I searched forums and they got it to work with turning one of the cores off and there is no way I'm doing that. I need to learn to use linux (already used ubuntu previously, liked it, but want to try a different one). Why is linux hardware support so shotty when windows works on everything I've ever tried? -hamilton

Well yes, I was trying fedora and it will not work without turning off one of the cores or turning off acpi which I'm not going to do. I will pay for a linux distribution if I need to I just want to get it running on my machine.

If you're looking for a commercial distro, I'd recommend SuSE.

Well my laptop designed for windows yes, but I also have a desktop that I decided to keep windows on that I built myself that will also not run Fedora 7 because it too has a core 2 duo. All I want is a linux distribution that I can wipe clean my laptop hard drive with. I don't care about anything specific to the laptop (the media buttons or what not). I will look into commercial distributions.

First off... don't listen to any "it was designed for windows" crud. That's a load of bull. With the exception of a few outdated graphics cards built specifically to work with DirectX. Beyond that... Hardware is pretty much universal.

Don't judge any distro by their "Live CD" simply because they all default to it's simplest of available kernels and kernel modules.

I can't think of any distro who's live cd will take advantage of a dual core. They're built to simply take a cosmetic glance at the distribution, and very rarely reflect the power of the distro itself.

If you want full advantage of a dual core, your 2 best bets would be openSuSE or Fedora (don't be put off by the Fedora live...give the full distro a run). Out of the 5 machines I network in my home, 2 run openSuSE, 2 Fedora, and one I maintain Gentoo. In addition my two laptops run Mint and PClinuxOS (although I'm very close to dumping PCLinuxOS for SuSE).

I testdrive many distros on my non production machines, and update my production machines based on performance. SuSE and Fedora are the most reliable when it comes to keeping up with hardware. However between those two, I maintain bleeding edge on my SuSE machines because the contributions from SuSE/Novell is bested by nobody, and Fedora maintains a stable system, albeit a bit slow to upgrade (that's a compliment, not a deteriment).

In a nutshell, my fedora machines can simply upgrade from previous releases reliably, whereas my SuSE machines will require a fresh clean install every 2 or 3 releases (I really do prefer SuSE, however I'm also somebody who doesn't mind poking with my systems).

Debian/Ubuntu can bite me though. While they are reliable distros, they ride the coattails of other distros and get all the attention.

Everyone's recommending an rpm based distro... that's fine I suppose, although I still have bad memories of RPM HELL from a number of years ago... I use gentoo and ubuntu.

If you want to know all the ins and outs of your setup and spend lots of time tweaking go for gentoo... if you want something easy try opensuse or ubuntu

my laptop:

Dell e1705 2gb ram core 2 duo 2ghz nvidia geforce 7900go intel 3945 wireless all worked out of the box with ubuntu/kubuntu feisty (the latest stable version) - even sleep/standby works! only thing i'm struggling with is hibernate (which i don't care much about) and the computer doesn't boot when i have my ipod plugged in (although this seems like a hardware thing not a linux thing, as it doesn't appear to even do POST).

Getting core 2 duos to work is usually just a matter of having a recent enough kernel (2.6.20 is plenty recent for this), and this can be done with any distro depending on how much work ad how much customization you want... as some others have hinted linux has fine hardware support, in fact it supports more hardware than windows does (by far) - the places it's lacking are laptop related stuff and wireless (although the wireless support is getting very good very quickly).

Well I finally got openSuse 10.3 to install onto my laptop. But after hours and hours of googling and trying different things I couldn't get it to connect to my wireless network (I have the broadcom bcm94311 card), thus not being able to update my graphics drivers so it is still in 800 X 600. I tried to install ubuntu 7.0.4 and it gave me a ton of errors and so now I'm just going to re-install windows, the only operating system that I've never had any problems with.

Well I finally got openSuse 10.3 to install onto my laptop. But after hours and hours of googling and trying different things I couldn't get it to connect to my wireless network (I have the broadcom bcm94311 card), thus not being able to update my graphics drivers so it is still in 800 X 600. I tried to install ubuntu 7.0.4 and it gave me a ton of errors and so now I'm just going to re-install windows, the only operating system that I've never had any problems with.