I just bought a brand new laptop only to load a linux disto on it and i wanted to know is slack 8.1 a good one to use because thats what my desktop uses. Or should i do a red hat install, or mandrake?

Slack is great on laptops! I've got a dinky Toshiba Portege 3020 (or
something, weighs almost nothing, has a Pentium with 32MB RAM) with
Slackware 8.1 running on it just fine. Except that 32 MB RAM is kind of
short for some of the things I need to do.

Yep same here, I've got an old Acer P166MMX with 32 megs of ram, I export X screens across the network from my Athlon.

But yeah, Slack would be a good choice, be sure to check out linux-laptop.net for some helpful hints if things go wrong

-- kroniq

hm... its not booting off of the slackware 8.1 cd. its giving me a non emulation error. whats that mean?

where are you getting the error? might wanna make sure your bios are set to boot off the cd-rom, and also might try a new cd.

and personally, i'd load slack8.0 before 8.1. i've had quite a few problems with 8.1 that really don't seem to make much sense to me (more complicated and less reliable boot scripts, misconfigured libraries, etc).

but i've got slack8 on 3 laptops and 8.1 on 2. works flawlessly on all 5! (though 8.1 required much fixing/tweaking)

I also have Slack on a laptop, actually I just did it last week finally, I'd been wanting to do it for months now (just lazy I guess).

Anyway, since my laptop is old I had to do an NFS install, which worked flawlessly. If you have another linux box you might try installing it that way.

I have an HP pavillion ze1115 running with slack 8.1. I did had to make the root and the 5 install diskettes in order to get the installation going. The only other thing that doesn't work is the modem, as it is one of those weird conexant, and I still haven't found the driver. But other than that, the system is so fast. Leaves XP eating dust.


FIGA

I've also got Slack 8.1 on a laptop, the booting from a CDROM issue is pretty much getting well documented as a standard pain in the arse, Patrick switched the boot methods from eltorito to... er, something else. Boot floppies works, but it takes 6, grumble grumble. It might be a BIOS being an idiot issue, fiddle with the options.

I never had the lib issues that Syncrm does, I switched just about everything I run over to Slack 8.1, doing all sorts of bizarre wacky stuff. I've chopped up pcmcia about 9 times, it handles that a lot happier than RedHat ever did, and this is finally the first Slack ever with Wireless Tools as a package! Finally!

There's my $.02

Cheers,

Finegan

I had slackware 8 on my IBM TP 366 celery , 96 Mb of RAM, near the end, I had a 5400rpm travel 48GB in it.

It ran Divxs (the 700 Mb one using mplayer with lots of tweaking options with the old 4.8GB disk on a 10Mbps network). Shows how performant slack is. With a tight kernel of course.

But then I sold it...