[ale] Installing Linux on PC

Venkat Swaminathan vswaminathan at manh.com
Fri Nov 19 13:35:00 EST 1999


I bought a new HP Pavilion 6460 about 6 months back (don't
question my judgement :-)

I am running SuSE Linux 6.2 (also ran 6.0) on it without any
serious problems. Had to throw out some stuff, of course. My
machine came with a winmodem -- threw that one out and bought
an ISA modem from Micro Center. Works fine. Also had to get
rid of the sound card and replaced with an Ensoniq. That one
works fine too. Actually my Pavilion had an "integrated" sound
and modem card. So I replaced one piece of hardware with two.
Video did not give any problems -- I use the Mach64 version of
the X server. My card is an ATI Rage Pro Turbo with 8 MB.

In the light of my experience I would recommend against buying
a brand name PC if someone wanted to get a new PC to run Linux.
While my PC works fine with Win98 (has problems there too), I
had to tweak it quite a bit to get it to work with Linux.

Another big problem with HP is they don't give you the original
Windows install CD. They have this "System Install" CD. That will
allow you to add/remove a few drivers. Beyond that you can only
copy disk images -- that would blow away your partition table too,
methinks.

-venkat



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Bedish [mailto:mark at gwsi.com]
> Sent: Friday, November 19, 1999 11:44 AM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] Installing Linux on PC
> 
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> I am hoping for some opinions. I inherited an HP Pavilion 4535 when 
> my woman left and now am hoping I can install Linux on it 
> with a minimum 
> of hassles. The PC itself is a Celeron 400 with 64MB and a 6.4GB HD. 
> My consternation is that the video is of the onboard Intel 
> AGP variety 
> and my only good experiences previously have been with PCI 
> video cards 
> I have purchased knowing before hand they worked with Linux. 
> Has anyone 
> else installed Linux on a similar machine? 
> 
> Any thoughts or comments are welcome. 
> 
> Thanks,
> Mark
> 
> 
> 






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