Starling & Linux Compatability

[Rifester]

Have any of you Starling owners installed other Linux operating systems on them? What was your experience? Has anyone tried installing OpenSUSE 11.2? I am curious to know if you had any hardware issues with another OS. Do you know who makes the installed wireless card? I am considering purchase of a netbook and would like to support System 76 for their work with Ubuntu and Linux.

Thanks!

[jml]

I have not tried any other distros, but if you want to try one, I would recommend that you boot a live CD from a USB optical drive first. That way, you can test to see how well it runs. The one area you will want to really evaluate is the wireless connectivity. The Starling is a very good Netbook, but it has a wireless card that is not very Linux friendly. Reading between the lines on several of Tom's posts it took quite a but for System 76 to get wireless working. Their custom driver was critical in getting the wireless to work reliably. So that bit of info and the fact that 9.04 works well for my needs keeps me from experimenting. Hopefully, others who have installed other distros will share their experiences. Good luck.

Joe

[mwiktowy]

Have any of you Starling owners installed other Linux operating systems on them? What was your experience? Has anyone tried installing OpenSUSE 11.2? I am curious to know if you had any hardware issues with another OS. Do you know who makes the installed wireless card? I am considering purchase of a netbook and would like to support System 76 for their work with Ubuntu and Linux.

Thanks!

I have tried out both Fedora 12 nightly compose liveUSBs and Moblin liveUSBs and they boot fine.

F12 runs quite well on the starling. F12 wireless works just as ... well ... as the UNR 9.10 one. You can install Moblin just like any other desktop environment and there seems to be efforts (Fedora Mini SIG) to get this to run well. Right now though it is somewhat buggy. I've had several things crash on me.

The Moblin img straight from the Moblin site boots and has a perky interface and is more stable but not bullet-proof. The project has some potential to make your netbook into a appliance that gives you easy access to a select number of tasks.