other distros on dell ubuntu laptops

[motoperpetuo]

my seven-year-old gateway laptop that i use mainly to test and play around with various linux distros finally died on me yesterday. rather than spend money trying to fix it, i'm thinking of just getting one of the dell ubuntu laptops. before i do so i want to ask if anyone out there has tried installing other distros on them?

i'm likely to at least try fedora 10, mint 6, and whatever version ubuntustudio is on now, not to mention ubuntu 8.10 (i think the dell machines are shipping with ubuntu 8.04 now) but i'll probably try others. i'm mostly worried about the fan working correctly. that was often a bit of a struggle on my old laptop. also, i'm interested to know what the likelyhood of suspend working is (that often seems to be difficult with linux, one of the only areas where i think windows dominates linux). i imagine that wireless will be easy, since these laptops are designed for linux.

i'd appreciate any comments or stories those of you out there have about trying other distros on dell ubuntu laptops. even if i do decide to mostly stick with ubuntu on my new laptop, it probably won't be dell's preinstalled version. i just like customizing my OS and installing it all from scratch. i'm sure many, if not most, of you can relate.

[notwen]

I've installed Debian Etch, AntiX, Puppy and various Ubuntu-derived distros on my Dell Inspiron 1420n(shipped w/ Hardy Heron). I got most of them working in all aspects, minus the suspend/hibernate features, which I've always had issues w/. I'd just double check the hardware prior to buying, but if you're eying the N-Series models know that these use a combination of open-source/custom drivers made by Dell. Ask if you have any additional questions. Hope this helps. =]

[motoperpetuo]

i appreciate the reply.

as a last-ditch effort, i decided to take apart my old laptop, clean it out, and see if that would help. it did. in fact, it's working better than it has for years now. it must have been a combination of cleaning out all the dust and gunk that had accumulated over the last seven years and reseating all the connections.

so, i won't be getting a new laptop for a little while now, but i'll probably eventually get one of the dells. still, if anybody wants to use this thread to discuss installing other distros on dell laptops, that would be great.

[scottmac112]

I've ran F8 (Fedora 8), Mandriva 2009, Ubuntu 7.04-8.10, Mint 5, openSUSE 11, Debian Etch and Lenny, Gentoo 2008.0, and Knoppix on this Dell Inspiron 1501. Marvelous! It works! I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 right now, running VMware in the background testing which one I'm going to install next.