Blowing away a computer and installing a different operating system is all part of a day's work for the Test Center. In fact, some projects in the Test Center over the past year have included a lot of time spent simply installing and reinstalling various Linux distributions on a single machine.

I’m buying a new laptop in April, and I’m not exactly floored by a dizzying array of options. As if I already hadn’t come to the conclusion that I needed a new laptop, my old laptop completely locked up on me while I was writing this post today. So I’m definitely in the market. Read on.

A few years back when I had relatively little knowledge of anything I installed a linux distribution (no names mentioned) on my old desktop and couldn’t really get anything to work. The biggest problem was getting the internet to work; it just didn’t seem to want to work at all. That really put me off trying again for a long time. I had an old laptop lying about that just wasn’t being used so I thought I would just install it and see what happened.

Installing Ubuntu Linux on a Netbook: Do you want to install Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution on your netbook?

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. I needed to get the laptop back into usable shape, and I did that by installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS beta 2. While trying to do an update on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation, well into the third day of the system building everything from source, I stopped that upgrade and tried to do one from packages only. Nope, it didn't work.

I have a Dell Latitude c600 laptop that I like to use for light work or when I’m on the go. Between overall awkwardness and to age of the laptop I have found it hard to find a Linux distribution that runs well without too much configuration.

The big news in the Linux realm for the past few months has been Dell's introduction of Ubuntu-preinstalled computers. Dell's not the only game in town, though -- there are also some Lenovo machines that are certified to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. You don't need assurances and certifications to get a good laptop system that will work with Linux, though.

Recently I purchased new laptop - A Toshiba A300D. Although my first computer was randomly chosen with absolutely no pre-purchase selection that laptop was very carefully selected among many others. So, I knew that it should work at least at the minimum level with my favourite GNU/Linux distribution - Fedora

These are short and easy things to do which can make your Linux desktop even more convenient than it currently is. Trying Ubuntu out without changing your distribution or creating a new drive partition or installing it on another HD, setting up OpenOffice so ability to read/write Windows Office 2007 word processor documents are what you'll learn how to do today.