Linux Mint Forums

My Brother is not Internet Savy at all. He has a Dell Dim 2400 and it has 82845G chipset. I know that Mint Editions have issues with that chip set and he does not live near me. I need to know if there is any distro that I can send him to get him on Linux. Input here very much appreciated.

willie42 wrote:My Brother is not Internet Savy at all. He has a Dell Dim 2400 and it has 82845G chipset. I know that Mint Editions have issues with that chip set and he does not live near me. I need to know if there is any distro that I can send him to get him on Linux. Input here very much appreciated.

This post in the Debian forums has a couple promising leads, but it looks like in general that chipset pretty much sucks.
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=52584

Yeah that chipset pretty much does bite. Hes asking and I am trying to tell him that hes in a bad situation with the chipset. I wont be doing anything for his machine for about another week or two so maybe someone else may have some words of wisdom. Thanks so much for your research on the subject. your help is greatly appreciated.

I would think that the real issue is not "which distro play nice with xxxxx chipset" . . . but which Linux Kernel does it have?

The newer kernels have better support for newer hardware (ie: chipsets and USB Modems) where the older kernels do not.

The default kernel in Debian Lenny 2.6.29 does not support USB Modems where the Defualt kernel in Debian Squeeze 2.6.32 does.
And this only improves as the new kernels are released.

The old 'stable' kernel 2.6.35 (Ubuntu 10.10) has very good support for Modems and Chipsets.
The current 'stable' kernel is at version 2.6.37 and it has very good newer hardware support.

You can go to a Linux Kernel site and check for 'support issues' of a particular kernel release.
http://kernel.org

Perhaps, installing a good OS and then upgrading the kernel to one that supports whichever chipset/hardware you need, would be the answer?

Thanks for the helpful tip. I will not be there during the change and my bother is not computer Savy. My dad is on Linux and has told him about it. I will look at my options there. I didnt think about kernel.org.

thanks vrkalak

Wary might be worth a shot
http://bkhome.org/wary/index.html

It uses an old version of the Linux kernel and X.org which supports some older hardware that isn't supported in the latest versions

well I hope it does because I will not be in the area when this machine is being upgraded. I will check this out.


thanks

I really appreciate it

Not too cast gloom on the thread but my old laptop has this chipset. I haven't been able to even get anything running with the vesa driver.

Every now and then I give it another shot, LM11 shows the most promise, all others below this have crazy screen resolution issues. But LM11 sets up the screen size perfect, I've noticed this on a few older laptops.

I'd suggest starting with Mint 11, perhaps xfce. In fact, you have put me in the mood to give it another shot. Maybe we can work this out lol.