What are the checks that should be done before installing Linux on a machine?

Question

What are the checks that should be done before installing Linux on a machine?

Answer 1

Mostly just that your hardware will be compatible for what you want to do. The two main problem areas are wireless cards and video cards. Video cards are an easy problem to solve; NVIDIA and ATI provide binary drivers on their website, and Intel drivers are included with most mainstream distributions. Wireless cards are a bit more problematic; some drivers, or "modules" are available for certain chipsets like Broadcom or Atheros. Other will require the use of ndiswrapper, which enables the use of Windows wireless drivers.