just inheritad a compaq laptop with a 64 bit cpu.

[eddie]

I will probably put ubuntu on it. Are there any other distros that might be interesting to put on a compaq turion 64 bit cpu. the live cd booted on it, but I did not do an install yet.

[Wally Balljacker]

I will probably put ubuntu on it. Are there any other distros that might be interesting to put on a compaq turion 64 bit cpu. the live cd booted on it, but I did not do an install yet.

Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, Bluewhite64...

[Claudio]

I've got Ubuntu 64-bit running on my work laptop which is a Dell Latitude D630. Runs REALLY snappy on it.

D630 Specs:

• 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300
• 2 GB RAM
• 120 GB Hard Drive

Ubuntu should run fine on your laptop if you choose to do so, but the other recommendations would also do very well.

[eddie]

Thanx, I went ahead and installed the 64 bit ubuntu. I have not tried the wireless yet, but otherwise it seems to work ok. I shrinked down the video memory to make installation easier. I only have .5 gig ram. Even though the laptop was free per se, I have to survive the cost of having the roof repaired from ike before I can think of any computer upgrades. I went to the hp site and tried to download a bios update and they only support windoze. the tech support said they do not even have a dos install version. I hate to install wine just for that. HP only supports linux when it is convenient. For the record, I am using a compaq presario v2000 laptop.

[jturning]

I think Compaq and HP use a lot of Broadcom wireless, not sure with your exact model. They use a main model number like mine which is HP Pavillion DV6000, but specifically it's actually DV6604NR (Compaq and HP are the same basically). If you have Broadcom you'll want to try the B43 driver if your chip is supported, and you need to use B43-fwcutter to get the firmware from the windows driver. B43 is the reverse engineered driver from the Linksys routers. If Broadcom weren't such jerks they'd release their driver to us. The reverse engineered driver works like a champ on this Fedora 9 64 bit using WPA2. On Fedora 8 I couldn't get it to work and used ndiswrapper with the 64 bit Windows driver which mainly worked, but sometimes had reconnect issues because of WPA2. The advantages of the reverse engineered driver is monitor and promiscuous modes, packet injection, mesh mode.....

Forum for Ubuntu which has info and links:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/219775

This site looked like it had some good info too:
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

Bugz

[eddie]

Ubuntu downloaded a restricted wireless driver b something or other. I did not pay attention to it. I will have to set up an access point to play with it. I no longer use wireless in the house.