Jerry Franz wrote:
For a new laptop your best hope for a successful native install is probably Ubuntu 10.10. Laptops in particular are difficult platforms for hardware support and CentOS5 is not 'cutting edge'. If you want CentOS on it to work well, you will probably need to wait for CentOS6 - which could be a month or two.
I'm eagerly waiting for Centos 6. Is so refreshingly nice to use a real computer operating system. It reminds me of the good old mainframe days long before MS-DOS 1.
Thank you for the recommendation. I'll have a look at Ubuntu.
Mark suggested http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath9k/RHEL5 which might solve the problem and produce a working Centos wifi.
Centos is not 'cutting-edge'. It's just solid, reliable, plain boring and just works. Everything a good computer system should be.
An alternative I've used is to install VMware Workstation on top of Windows and install Linux into a VM. Running fullscreen the practical difference is nil. Then you by and large get the laptop hardware support gratis from the windows layer including things like wireless and video drivers drivers.
I'll keep that as a back-up option.
Thank you very much.
Best regards,
Paul. GB.