T1B

Soliciting some opinions here. I ordered one of the new Inspirion 1520 machines (2 Duo Core T7300 2 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2, 256 Mb NVIDIA 8600 GT, 160 G 7200 RPM SATA, etc.....).

I'm seriously thinking of just cleaning Vista entirely off the system and running Linux only, probably Ubuntu, running Openoffice etc. Is this a good idea? Is there a particular order in which I should do this, i.e. leave Vista on and install Linux then wipe out Vista after, or just wipe out Vista and do a clean install of Linux.

Any thoughts or tips would be appreciated.

Is the order already submitted? If so, that's too bad, because there are places out there that would have done your laptop without an OS and allowed you to drop your own OS on after purchase. You could have saved 100 bucks.

Yea, when I ordered it I upgraded to the business edition as well. I just recently decided to go with a Linux system. Anyways my company is picking up $750 and my wife can get back $500 from hers so this machine is costing me about $400 out of pocket. My biggest gripe though is that they are taking forever to build and ship. Dell is having some seriously fucked up problems with these machines getting orders out in a timely manner.

Is anybody using the Openoffice products? Are they truly interchangeable with MS Office, so I can create excel and word docs that someone could use on a windows system.

Before you install Linux, create an image of the hard drive onto DVD-R's, then you can merge the recovery partition
and use the entire disk for Linux.

Should you ever decide to sell your laptop, you can reload Vista, and the new buyer will have a fresh, unused OS all ready
to go.

For imaging disks I would recommend Acronis True Image.

if ur worried about Open Office, Just download it on your windows machine and give it a try.. ive had decent luck with it and Ive been running Ubuntu on my laptop for a while,.. other than the occasional problem of not having Windows Media player (the Sirius Satellite radio site requires it) Ive had very little problems..

peter dragon wrote:... other than the occasional problem of not having Windows Media player (the Sirius Satellite radio site requires it)...

Try this

Stern fan?

Oh yeah...I also have rockbox installed on my Sansa. Amazing.

Linux is a good way to go, although the power management on a laptop is not as good in general as it is in windows. I've heard rumors that Intel may be releasing some of there much improved power management drivers so hopefully power management will not be an issue for long.

You should be able to find some software to replace most of the ones you would use. You might even be able to run windows software on the Linux laptop (check into the Wine project) but just be ready to spend some time learning.

Open office does work as advertised. It is interchangeable for the most part with MS Office 2003. Sometimes it does a better job reading office documents then ms office does. I'm not sure the status of decoding the new MS XML file format that MS Office 2007 uses by default, but this shouldn't be an issue because its not widely in use yet.

Of course if you were looking to run Linux, you could have also just purchased a MAC laptop. Mac OSX is based on Unix so you could have gotten the awesome usability of the Apple OS with the Unix stability/background and free tools of linux.

You may also want to test out some linux Live CDs. Most have OpenOffice on them and just about every major linux distro has some type of a Live CD that should allow you the ability to test them out and decide which one you like.

Last but not least, you can also think about installing VMWARE's server (free) on windows or on linux and run the other Operating systems that you might need once in a while on the same machine without having to bother with completely separate partitions and such.

Good luck!