Sony Buyer

I am thinking about installing a Linux or Solaris distribution on my system in addition to Windows which was preinstalled. Yet, it makes me wonder if I will have problems with missing drivers, driver incompatibilities or even other things that I’m not even aware of so far. I can’t find any specific drivers on the Sony support sites which are explicitly made for anything else apart from Windows and I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to use Windows XP or Vista drivers on a Linux system.

So my questions are:

- Does the Linux community provide drivers that are especially made for a certain model?

- Can one say that it’s more complicated switching to Linux using a notebook instead of a desktop system?

- Am I right to consider the drivers as the biggest hinderance or am I missing out on something else?

- What else do I have to take into account?
Yes, I have currently 3 partitions on my HDD. So this will not be a big deal. I have recently downloaded Open Solaris and installed it with VirtualBox. I have also burned a bootable CD. Both the CD and the VirtualBox installation were functional, but failed in both cases to establish any internet connection. Some devices had missing drivers, which could obviously not been updated. So I figured this might be the reason as well as the main challenge. Installing it directly on a separate partition is in fact my next step in my course of learning by doing.

you will first have to know how to partition your hard drive.. for a dual boot system..

well I would download Ubuntu live cd and boot up from the cd/dvd first and test if it will work on your sony system… it will run from the cd/dvd without installing it. you can play with all the programs. get on the internet if you have broadband internet.

Always test by running from the cd/dvd before installing on to your hard drive

it is the same with all Linux distrobutions you can run them from the cd's before you install them

here are a list of linux web sites I would download and test
each version as two different desktops
KDE and Gnome

there are linux magazines that you can buy that come with dvd's with over 4 gig of software and linux versions on

Linux Pro magazine also online reading
Linux format magazine also online reading
Linux + magazine
these mags will teach you every thing you want to know about Linux you can get them from any big book store.. some linux versions have their own online magazine

this = * * * * * five stars execlent Operating system

Sun solaris is Unix not Linux but it is good too I have tested all of these