Hey all, very new poster here, but wanted to tell you all of a success story I had installing SIMPLYMepis on a new Dell Inspiron 2200 laptop.
You can read more at my blog
www.theollyblog.com, but here's a quick synopsis:
I have been a user of Ubuntu for quite a while, installing it on the IBM G40 that my wife and I shared with only a few minor hiccups (wireless!). So when I got a new Dell Inspiron, I wanted to do an Ubuntu install on it as well. Only problem is that Ubuntu wouldn't natively recognize the laptop display. I'm willing to put some work into fixing an install, but that's a big pain as I didn't have an external monitor to hook up to, so I started looking for another distro to use. After several Live CD download's, I found Mepis (which I hadn't heard of), read a lot about it, saw how well it's standings were on distrowatch, and downloaded it. It worked perfectly out of the box, with the exception of wireless. But everything else, from soundcard to display were recognized with no issues!
Solved the wireless quickly too, in about 20 minutes, by using ndiswrapper:
ndiswrapper -i <dellinfile.inf>
modprobe ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper -m
Rebooted, voila, riding along wirelessly.
Just wanted to let all the rest of you know, as there was a fair lack of information on Linux being succesfully run on the Inspiron 2200, both because it's a newer laptop, and Dell's don't always play well with linux.
Cheers!
-olly
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