3. Introducing The Products

Both Novell and Red Hat have made significant contributions to many key areas of Linux computing, much of which influences the way Linux is used and perceived especially lately in terms of desktop (or in this case, notebook) usage. Both have formalized professional-grade commercial and community-based Linux distributions that make excellent candidates for mobile PC users.

The term community-based is used to describe an openly available version of a Linux distribution presumably from a vendor that also produces a similar commercial product purchased through retail channels. In this case, both Red Hat (Fedora) and SuSE products encompass everything from community-based OSS distributions to highly-scalable enterprise-class server solutions.

The relative strengths and merits of each platform are often related simply to personal preferences. What makes one platform more successful than another comes down to personal experience with a given product, where not all such experiences are the same. Most of what initially defines that experience arises during the installation and configuration process. And, in these areas experiences with notebooks can be most frustrating. The good news is that Linux distributions are much more polished now. They need to be to thrive in the same increasingly competitive market space as products such as Microsoft's Windows. Usability, flexibility, and capability are key driving forces in top-level community distributions such as openSUSE and Fedora.

The following table is a comparison of the most notable software inclusions for both distributions:

Fedora and openSUSE are both well-stocked with thousands of applications, as evidenced by their multi-disk CD sets. There is also plenty of overlap between the two. Perhaps more important is that, as well-behaved platforms, neither carries software that poses licensing nor patent problems with their MP3 libraries, DVD decryption support, Windows 32-bit codecs, or the numerous third-party applications (commercial and otherwise) bundled alongside these operating systems.

Many of these packages are available through third-party repositories as well and can be surprisingly easy to implement using platform package management facilities, as described later in this article.

Our Test Setup

Part of the difficulty with a truly successful Linux notebook installation isn't entirely the fault of Linux, as some may believe. Component vendor relations with Linux software developers can be all over the place. Many complications arise from proprietary components or restrictive licensing schemes and how they relate to open source software (OSS). Notebooks can be an especially tricky proposition, where internal components turn over quickly from one hardware revision to the next and where an incompatible component usually can't be exchanged for a compatible one. Many components are proprietary and, as we mentioned before, the necessary information to construct Linux drivers is not available. For these reasons we chose an older, trailing edge laptop for our story because Linux conversion makes good use of notebooks that are no longer state-of-the-art.

The Intel 82801 controller is supports many devices: AC'97 audio, USB, PCI, and IDE functionality.