To put it simply: I have found a solution for Linux on my Laptop that works for me.
An important fact about me (and therefore my approach to this) is that I'm not a systems administrator, but I do have 15 years experience working with computers as a designer, new-media developer and animator. I don't use Linux in my day-to-day work. I've just had enough of MS Windows (and never got on with Macs) and want an alternative. So what I need is something that works more-or-less from the point where it is installed and that my limited knowledge will allow me to cope with any things that I need to configure or fix.
The laptop I use (every day) is an HP DV2130ea.
Having left Ubuntu a few weeks ago when the new version decided to forget all about my hardware, I proceeded to try out a range of distributions, quite rapidly, to see if I could find one that managed to identify my hardware (critical requirement was it had to find and configure both my Intel WIFI and Nvidia Graphics Adapter). PCLinuxOS and Dream Linux both looked interesting but failed to work for me.
As part of this I discovered a very useful site: DistroWatch. A great site that lists most of (if not all) the available distributions and provides links to reviews, community sites and download locations. They also provide a hot-list of the most viewed distributions on their site – a good rough indicator of usage / popularity.
It was from this that I found OpenSUSE. A linux distribution funded and developed by Novell.
It got my interest from more-or-less the third screen of the installer, where it correctly identified my Wifi card and Graphics adapter and also managed to cope with the fact that my laptop has a widescreen display.
The rest of the installation was exactly what I had hoped it would be: uneventful.
OpenSUSE itself is easy to work with in the same sense that any of the Linux versions you choose to install are just about similar to MS Windows that you can find the application / control panel you need. The interface is clean and the pre-installed set of applications covers most things that you'd need, with a good range of applications available from the application installer with a minimum of fuss.
The list of applications that I'm running includes Open Office, Flock, Skype, Second Life, Blender, Thunderbird , Vmware, Remote Desktop.
The installations for all of these was relatively simple, as was creating menu icons for those that didn't do this themselves (seems to be a common thing in my experience).
Even the installation and configuration of VMWare Player wasn't too tricky and made much easier by a good walkthrough that can be found on the OpenSUSE website here.
So what I now have is a laptop that works, with the software I needed and so far (on the limited sample of 2 weeks) It's been reliable to the point where I can forget about it and just work. You can see samples of the graphics that I've produced below.
An that I guess was the biggest wrench – leaving the Adobe suite of applications behind. Despite their high cost, they are a great set of applications. What is encouraging is that the open source alternatives are very good and nearly offer all the required functionality.
A brief note to the GIMP community – can we have vector objects (multiple in one layer) and layer folders please, because these are the only things that I have missed having moved from Photoshop to GIMP, and that says something right there.
Right now, I'm on a train to meet a client, and I will be demoing some bespoke MS Windows applications in a VMWare virtual machine on this laptop. That's about as good as I could have possibly hoped for.
OpenSUSE has a new version 11 out in about 30 days. I'll let you know how the upgrade goes.
PH
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