Depends.
If wireless, you need to get the firmware in most cases (even if the driver is loaded at default). Some distro like Mint comes with proprietary firmware. Except Broadcom. You'll have to get it on your own. Just going to your respective distro forum and search for solution.

For graphic, most distro will have intel driver shipped. NVIDIA and ATI mostly you have to install on your own. But there are some exception also though (Sabayon, Mandriva etc)

Sound, mouse, keyboard external harddisk etc should work out of the box without installing anything. Except in some very rare cases.

Good luck in Linux-ing!

Windows' Bootloader doesn't support booting into a linux system. (as far as i know, correct me if i'm wrong.) GRUB is just a bootloader, it will boot Linux and Windows just fine, so why do you need to remove it especially when you wan to use linux?

If you are using Windows XP, boot your XP install cd, and go into rocovery console and run this command:

fixmbr

If you are using Vista, then boot your Vista install cd. Choose "Repair My computer" at the first screen, go into CMD and run this command:

bootrec /FixMbr

Hope it helps.

Yes. It may not be visible at first. But when you installed more than one windows on the same pc then you should see it.

What do you mean by installation file? Is it the package that those distributions include or is it the installation process?

As for installation process you really don't have to worry much. Most Linux distros are pretty easy to install nowadays. Apart from the disk partitioning part, may be a bit confusing for those who have not done it before.

If you are asking about the packages, most Linux distros come with pretty much the same package. Major differences may be in the choice of Desktop Environment. (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc) Other than that most basic packages should be there, only the version might be slightly different.

Depends. Some installer are distro dependent, some aren't. Example, opera packages its software into specific package for most popular distros. But if your distro is not listed you still can use the "Generic" package. It might also be possible to use, for example, Ubuntu packages on Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu). As long as the dependencies are satisfied you should have no problem installing and running the software.

Btw, you can try to get software from the openSUSE build service. It support building packages for other distros. (I don't think you can get proprietary software from there though.)

http://software.opensuse.org/search



Yeah. Unless you wan to try something unconventional, like LILO.

This post has been edited by sc4bbk: Oct 30 2008, 08:33 PM

Firefox has great support for Linux, but I use opera anyway.
Personally i think Amarok is good enough for my music needs, so i don't use foobar.
The ability to play multimedia files (mkv, avi, wma etc) depends on the multimedia backend and the codec available in your system, so not really an issue with player.
I'm using kaffein and mkv files play just fine.
For celcom modems (Globe surfer and blue cube) i depends in UMTSmon to connect them to internet. Should work with Huawei modem as well.
and for NTFS support, most distros comes with ntfs-3g so you can read and write to NTFS partitions.

And for microsoft office, I think Open Office's writer is good enough. But Impress(power point) is a bit impossible for me. In the case when i need to make nice presentation slides i'll just fire up Windows XP from VirtualBox and launce Office 2007 from there.

Open office will open Microsoft Office's documents without problem. But if you wan to open OpenOffice documents in microsoft office, take a look at
"Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office"


Oh, btw, did I forgot to mention I'm openSUSE user?

This post has been edited by sc4bbk: Nov 5 2008, 04:19 PM

If you need KDE4, i suggest you go for Distro with KDE 4.1. Personally i think KDE4.0 is not very useble even in openSUSE. (Ppl say that they have the best KDE4 integration)

So far for the main GNU/Linux distro only Mandriva and Kubuntu officially come with KDE4.1. I installed Mandriva 2009.0 on my friend's laptop before. Quite stable. But I do not particularly like the distro bcuz of its package management & Network Configuration. I haven't tried Kubuntu 8.10 though.

If you dun need KDE4 then I'll say openSUSE 11.0 or Mint 5 (Gnome/KDE). You might need to mount NTFS partition on your own(the point & click in KDE3.5.9 has some problems) and install codecs, driver etc in openSUSE though. Mint 5 is really easy to use. Almost everything work out of the box. But i'm using openSUSE now cuz my laptop works best with it and it's really powerful.

If you wan a lot of community support then go for Ubuntu.

The choice is yours

This post has been edited by sc4bbk: Nov 5 2008, 08:51 PM

Why do you need KDE4 so much actually? I think Mint's Gnome is pretty user friendly and cool at the same time.
openSUSE does has problem with point-and-click NTFS mounting. But if you learn how to do it with command line, then there is no problem.
Kubuntu you can give it a try, but I can't give comment on their latest version cuz I haven't tried it yet.