zd8156ea

[alessandro basili <al.basili@gmail.com>]

Hi everyone, I'm very new to Linux in general and expecially to Debian,
but, considering that I've just bought an HP pavillon zd8156ea, that I
consider a monster from the harware point of view (at least for a
laptop), and that I do not want to use Windows anymore (because even
with 2GB of ram and 3 GHz processor clock looks like it is a 8086
processor), I would like to ask if anyone of you have tried installing
Debian on it. Somewhere I found that Debian is one of the most complete
linux distribution for laptop, is this true?
Moreover I'd like to understand if some of the tools I need to work are
Debian compliant, considering that they work surely under RedHat (I'd
like to add that they are not open source, they are hardware tools for
FPGA development). Can someone of you give me some hints? 
Just one more, having just a try is too long for me, because of my
ignorance in this field, so I'd rather like to know if it is possible
to do so in a "brief" time (without ending after 4 weeks with something
like: "ok, it's not possible to do").

Thank you very much...for all your suggestions

Alessandro