Acer 5315-2153, $348,Walmart Special + Mandriva 2008 (Spring edition)

[dwr50]

Just to let everyone know, I tried Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04 on this computer and none of them recognized the WiFi card or the Sound Card. MandrivaOne Live CD (Spring edition) is the only version, so far, that I've found that has worked properly on this laptop.I have since installed Mandriva on the HD using the instructions found here http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-mandriva-one-2008-spring-gnome and am in the process of trying out all of the included applications. So far I have been quite happy with Mandriva.

[wolfen69]

good to hear. my philosophy is, just use the right tool for the right job. im not afraid to use any of the 40+ distros that i have. every os has its place. that being said, i agree that mandriva is awesome, and has worked great. the only trouble i had was when i dual booted with hardy. but installing ubuntu second took care of that. for some reason installing mandriva last screwed everything up. no biggie though.

but i have to say that mandy seems a little more stable than hardy at the moment. but all in all, using both has been great. i have mandy for my K fix, and ubuntu for gnome. for me, it doesnt get much better than that.

btw, thanks for the info about the laptop.

[jrusso2]

I have been using a lot more Mandriva lately then Ubuntu. I have been finding it very good at hardware detection and stable and easy to use.

I usually install synaptic and apt though as I find the mandriva installer on the slow side.

[tdrusk]

I have an Aspire 3680. Hardy ran fine on it, but flash kept crashing. I noticed that it does this the most in Ubuntu distributions. I switched to Mandrake to just give it a try and everything works! I didn't have to do any work to set it up except show the GUI where my .inf file was for wireless.

It reminds me a lot of PCLOS, which I liked but felt slightly outdated with way too many updates off the start. It feels like PCLOS, only set up perfectly for my hardware.

[AdamWill]

tdrusk: to be fair to PCLOS, that's because of their release strategy. PCLOS is a rolling-release distro: you're supposed to install it once then just keep updating it forever. Because of this they don't do regular ISO refreshes. So it's probably not a good reason to discount PCLOS as a distro choice. Of course, I'm glad you're enjoying Mandriva :)

The resemblance between PCLOS and Mandriva is expected, as PCLOS uses Mandriva as its initial base. There are quite a lot of significant differences between the two, though.

[dca]

If you're Acer carries the Atheros AR5006 (listed as) chipset or AR5007... Whatever it is, Mandriva includes the patched MadWifi that allows it to work, Ubuntu you have to follow this and apply the patch:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=662877

[wolfen69]

i get great reception with the ralink driver in mandy. it's on instantly upon getting to my desktop. i love the speed im getting.