Testing out distributions/software / Playing around with things (Was: [ILUG] Thanks)

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006, Jeroen Massar wrote:

> Thomas Meehan wrote:
> [..]
> > I'm hoping that the more user friendly Ubuntu will help me over come these
> > obstacles and allow me to get to grips with Linux.
> 
> In these cases (testing out new software and just playing around and
> also quite a number of other cases) VM's are very very helpful,

So too are live cds.  I'm not certain if Fedora have a LiveCD but the
standard Ubuntu installer disk is a LiveCD.  So you can just pop it in,
reboot and see what hardware works right away.  Then if you're not happy or
need a little more time to understand how to fix something, you can hold
onto your existing platform.

> > So at the moment I've got a laptop that works perfectly                                                                    
> > and looks good but won't connect to the internet, play mp3s or dvds and is
> > therefore pretty much useless to me.

Maybe, rather than jumping to another distro you should first describe
what's not working in detail.  The internet connection is the first thing
to start with as once you have that fixed, fixing the others will get much
easier.

Is it an internal modem, wireless, aDSL (usb/ethernet?) or what?  What's
not working?  What have you tried?

Bear in mind that Ubuntu uses much the same software as Fedora (with some
exceptions admittedly) so if for some reason you have an unsupportable
device, moving to a different linux might not help.  Of course, maybe it's
just that Fedora hasn't correctly detected what driver it needs to use, in
which case it's possible that another distro might do better, or worse ;-)

Gavin