theNogblog.com

My wife has a Dell Inspiron 2650 that’s about to go to computer heaven (of course with it being a Dell it is probably going the other direction). That is until I completely wiped off every trace of Windows and installed Ubuntu Linux. As a brand new Linux user this was quite a chore. Although the install was easy, the rest of the OS was not. Ubuntu did not correctly set up the laptop screen. So after hours of twiddling with the xorg.conf file I finally got the screen set up correctly. Well, Ubuntu worked great (other than the wireless). Then I stumbled on the Brazil-based DreamLinux through Digg. As a lifetime Mac user I always appreciate eye candy. Next thing I knew I was erasing my wife’s hard drive and installing DreamLinux 2.0. I had to create a new xorg.conf to get the laptop screen to display correctly. DreamLinux worked great for several weeks. It was fast, it had all the crucial applications for a basic user, and it was looking real pretty. However, after serveral weeks I realized that it just wasn’t as technically polished as Ubuntu. Plus most of its forum help wasn’t in english. So I started contemplating moving to Xubuntu. As I was downloading the Xubuntu install, I found openSUSE Linux. After checking out a video of SUSE 10.1 in action at OSvids I decided to give SUSE a try. I chose to do the install over the internet. I thought the install was much more complicated than the Ubuntu install. After doing some searches on the internet I found an FTP address that worked. I waited most of the afternoon for everything to download and install. When I started up the SUSE for the first time I was astonished. Everything just worked. No messing with the xorg.conf and no X server errors. On top of that the GUI actually looked pretty good! So after exploring the world of Linux I think I have found my distribution. They key for me at this point is constantly reminding myself that the Dell is still my wife’s computer.

Note: To give a little back to the Linux community you may download my xorg.conf file for the Dell Inspiron 2650.
Ubuntu xorg.conf