Steve,<br><br>Glad to be helpful where I can!<br><br>Your laptop's stats look like it's easily powerful enough to run Linux.<br><br>Since you say that you want to try either Ubuntu or Gentoo, my personal advice would be to give Ubuntu a try first. Gentoo is very very good at being a distribution that you can customize and optimize to get every last bit of power out of your computer. Optimizing is always a good thing, but your machine looks powerful enough to me that you aren't likely to be desperate to squeeze all the power out of it that you can.
<br><br>Ubuntu, on the other hand, I haven't actually tried but the reviews I've heard have been very positive about how easy to install and use it is, and it seems to be gathering popularity very nicely. Since you're looking to get comfortable with using Linux as your main operating system, it makes more sense to me to start out with the distribution that's less likely to tempt you into dealing with more detail than absolutely needed (like choosing which file system you want to use, or compiling a custom kernel).
<br><br>What I'm hearing from you is that you want to use this for your school work and since we're in the middle of a semester that makes it extra important to get it running and doing the basic things that you need it to do to be comfortable and productive. Gentoo is excellent for getting access to the details of your computer's setup so that it's exactly the way you want it, and dealing with those details does teach you about the way Linux works, but it doesn't sound to me as if the things you want to learn are in the area of file systems and kernel modules so much as getting comfortable with the desktop environment and programs, as well as doing some programming (which normally doesn't require understanding a whole lot of technical detail on how the operating system itself actually works).
<br><br>Once you feel good about your ability to use Linux at the desktop level, if you want to learn more about the internals Gentoo should serve you very well. At the moment, my instincts are saying Ubuntu will serve you better, but other people may feel differently and you should obviously go whichever way makes you feel the best about using your computer.
<br><br>I would suggest going to the ubunto website (<a href="http://ubuntu.com">ubuntu.com</a>) and download the LiveCD and see how it does at recognizing your hardware and working on your computer. Like I said before, don't worry if it seems slow. Running an operating system from a CD is always slow.
<br><br>Something else you might like to try out is the VMWare Player (<a href="http://www.vmware.com/products/player/">http://www.vmware.com/products/player/</a>). It's free these days and basically allows a home user to run more than one operating system at a time. This particular version of the VMWare software only lets you use virtual machines that have already been created. They have a pre-made copy of Ubuntu (no Gentoo, I'm afraid) for it available on the VMWare website. The downside of this approach is that running more than one OS at once through a virtual machine requires more system resources than running just one, as you'd expect. So I'm not sure how well it'd run with 512 MB of RAM.
<br><br>If you're interested in VMWare, a gentleman from the company is coming to do a talk on April 29. That's a Saturday, unfortunately, but if it turns out you have some time that day it may be worth a look.<br><br>- Bobbie Lynn
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