Best distro for my new R50e project?

[lukee]

Hi, I am starting my R50e project soon - it will be R50e-based system with some components from T42 (14" shell, RAM, 1.8GHz Dothan, Bluetooth, 7K100 HDD, WiFi Intel 802.11b) and I'm very curious what Linux distribution may I use with this laptop? It will be 100% Linux laptop without any dualboot. I'm quiet good skilled in Ubuntu and I very love the APT packaging system (*.deb) so I would like to select only from the following range:

Linux Mint 11 --> Debian 5.06 --> Ubuntu 11.04 (preferred desktop is GNOME).

As the R50e mobo is equipped with an Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (Intel 855GM chip) I would welcome as best as possible support of this integrated GPU by the selected distribution. The laptop is going to be used for:

- creating documents & spreadsheets
- CAE opensource tools, especially for electronic engineering
- browsing the Net
- light PHP development with Geany IDE and MySQL server (LAMP)
- light programming in C language
- occasional watching of movies in VLC media player

Looking forward to your suggestions. Thanks.

[ozzymud]

Your prolly gonna get all 3 of your choices as answers from different people, plus some other flavors from fans of other distros...

That being said, your R50e is very well supported in Linux, I prefer Debian for it's more minimalistic approach, use a net install cd, choose desktop (which defaults to gnome) at the end.

Ubuntu/Mint will do a little more of the config work for you, but Debian will be a lighter system.

Here is a guide linked from Thinkwiki: http://www.mk-stuff.de/artikel/linux_on ... kpad_r50e/

It's for Debian 3.1 but most info should apply to current.

[ajkula66]

Your weakest link is that 2100B card...spend a few bucks on a 2200BG or any IBM/Atheros one...

My choice would be Mint. I've found it to be extremely friendly towards ThinkPads of that era, and Intel graphics help a lot...

My $0.02 only...

[sportfreak]

i agree with George for the Linux Mint option .. we had a R60 ( i think ) in the office, couple of months ago, and my minion had trouble getting ubuntu 9.10 on it .. we even tried FC13 but no vain .. then we tried linux mint, and le voila ..

[hlaj]

Hi, I am starting my R50e project soon - it will be R50e-based system with some components from T42 (14" shell, RAM, 1.8GHz Dothan, Bluetooth, 7K100 HDD, WiFi Intel 802.11b) and I'm very curious what Linux distribution may I use with this laptop? It will be 100% Linux laptop without any dualboot. I'm quiet good skilled in Ubuntu and I very love the APT packaging system (*.deb) so I would like to select only from the following range:

Linux Mint 11 --> Debian 5.06 --> Ubuntu 11.04 (preferred desktop is GNOME).

As the R50e mobo is equipped with an Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (Intel 855GM chip) I would welcome as best as possible support of this integrated GPU by the selected distribution. The laptop is going to be used for:

- creating documents & spreadsheets
- CAE opensource tools, especially for electronic engineering
- browsing the Net
- light PHP development with Geany IDE and MySQL server (LAMP)
- light programming in C language
- occasional watching of movies in VLC media player

Looking forward to your suggestions. Thanks.

Trisquel (http://www.trisquel.info) gives you all the goodness of Ubuntu in a package
containing only 100% free software. I think that the "intel" driver is free, so your GPU
should be well supported. I'm not completely sure about intel wifi though, but you would
be able to get it through ndiswrapper in any event.

If you want to run FreeBSD but like the apt packaging system, there is kfreebsd
available through the debian website, which contains the best of both worlds.