Re: zd8156ea

[Ian Greenhoe <ihgreenman@gmail.com>]

Hi there!

I'd agree with one of the other posters that said to try knoppix.  If
nothing else, it does a very good job of autodetecting the hw.  If it
can't find something, that can give you a good idea of where your
trouble spots will lie.

As far as installing Linux goes, here's what you will likely find:
* Your CPU, graphics card, display, trackpad, keyboard, hdd, ethernet
card, usb, sound card, and PCMCIA bus will be supported.
* Your wireless card may be supported.  If you do an lspci (under
Knoppix/Debian) and tell us *exactly* what wireless card you have (more
precisely what chipset it uses), someone will be able to tell you if it
is supported
* Suspend to ram will probably not work (Seems to only work on IBM
Thinkpads)
* Suspend to disk will probably work (Seems to work for most people.)
* Your built in sd/memory stick/etc reader may work (about even odds).

As far as using RedHat software, try the "alien" package if you can't
find what you need to use packaged for Debian.  Alien allows you to
install software directly from an RPM (RedHat Package Manager file).

HTH,
-Ian

On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 19:48 +0200, alessandro basili wrote:
> 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