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Linux Laptop Recommendations for 2002?
ocasek asks: "I have been looking into buying a laptop again and one of the requirements I have is that it will be able to run Linux with all features turned on (i.e. suspend, APM, etc.). I used to own a Dell Inspiron 8000 that I had Mandrake 8.0 configured and running on, and aside from the wonderful BIOS hooks for PCMCIA that never worked completely, it was a good laptop.
My question to the /. Community is, in your opinion, what is the best laptop out there to run Linux? I would be interested to hear what OS's you are running on what brand of laptop."
Debian Woody on an iBook 500. Everything works, once I compiled a kernel from Ben H.
There is http://www.linux-laptop.net/ as one source if info, but I'm curious too.
Everyone knows that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers colaborate on BIOS hooks and drivers, does anyone know if any laptop makers have made an effort to be so friendly to the Linux kernel and utilities?
I saw a wonderful laptop here in Tokyo a couple months ago, DVD, CD-RW, 1280x1024x32, 1Ghz Athalon, 20GB... but I realized that it's totally designed around Windows, and I'm not going to spend that kind of money on something I cannot utilize in its entirety.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Wow is this bitch fast, I was totally blown away. Before installing YDL (LinuxPPC unfortunately hasn't been updated as recently or often as Yellow Dog) I was used to the double-buffer-double-slowness of OSX. With default, non-tweaked XFree86 config files, this thing absolutely flies, feels faster than the 1.2ghz Athlon workstation running linux I use at work.
Neat hardware stuff? USBview works as advertised, wireless networking took 30 minutes to setup, and firewire is the only main peripheral without robust support, something you're not going to find on any platform.
Price? TiBook is 400 mghz budget special (you can find them for $1600 these days)overclocked to 500mghz.
The main downside is that all of the RPMs out there are x86. Upside is that rpmfind.net has plenty of YellowDog rpms and Ximian's Red Carpet works great with it. If you want details on my setup, email editor@macgimp.org
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
I have an IBM T21 that I'm very happy with. Pretty much everything just works, and there are even tools to manage some of the Thinkpad-specific settings (tpctl). I've been running Debian Sid on it for over six months now and everything works, including the Lucent Winmodem, USB, PCMCIA, sound (using the cs46xx OSS driver in the kernel), IR, APM (suspend works great, but I haven't fiddled with hibernate), and XFree86 4.1 includes an okay driver for the Savage/IX video card. I don't know if Ultrabay hot swapping can work under Linux, although I have used the Ultrabay to put a second hard drive in at boot time.
I do have some video-related problems, though. One annoying, but not really limiting, problem is that the text mode display gets corrupted when X runs. That means I can't Alt-Shift-F[1-6] to virtual consoles after X starts up (well, I can, but I see blinking, flashing fruit salad). This has only caused me a problem once when X locked up and I wasn't on a network where I could SSH in from another box to restart it, so I had to hit the power button (which isn't too bad, since I use a journaled FS). When I shut down I see the same garbage. The others are that the DGA2 support has some issue that blanks the screen when VMWare from goes into full-screen mode, and also seems to cause some occasional lockups for the StarOffice 6.2beta (yes, it's somehow related to the video card), but you can define a certain environment variable to get rid of the StarOffice problem. Since I work for IBM I've talked to various people in the Thinkpad support organizations and they say they're working with S3 to get better Linux drivers made available, so soon I expect even my minor problems to go away.
It's also small, light, fast, runs relatively cool, has a big, bright 1400x1050 display and has the always-excellent IBM keyboard.
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Im sure there are a few out there. The problem is there havent been any major releases (that i recall) in 2002. There is a good chance many of the features will be supported but maybe not all. So buy your laptop hopefuly of high quality and reputable brand, Dell, Sony, toshiba, HP, etc... and wait, and check for drivers, updates every so often. The next Major release of your favorite dist. should cover things.
.. And it works pretty well. I inherited it from my boss (he bought an A30p). We're both running Red Hat 7.2. He constantly used to gripe about the A20 freezing up in X. After having it for a couple of days, I determined that SpeedStep was somehow causing the problem.
Without SpeedStep my battery life is about 30 minutes, but that's not a major issue for me. The A30p seems to be stable even with speedstep turned on.
I don't know very much about other laptops, but I can speak from experience. I have an Armada M700, P3 750Mhz w/192Mb RAM, Ati Rage Mobility P 8Mb, 12Gb hdd, Intel EtherExpress NIC, Maestro2 sound, etc. And it's running RedHat 7.2 flawlessly.
All I had to do was insert the install CD, and everything worked perfectly from then on. Autodetected my video, sound, network, APM, etc. No error messages, no troubles with anything. After the install, everything was still running perfectly. None of the problems that a previous poster has with the text mode after starting X. The sound works (does not break, etc). Power management works too, I just have to figure out how to set it up properly, so that it actually does what I want it to do.
Now I know that this is not a brand-new model (at least not with these specs), but you can get the latest one, with pretty much the same base components. They are flawlessly supported in RedHat, even from the very start.
On top of that, Compaq business support is great. I needed a new LCD for it, and they 24/7 phone support, free overnight shipping to and from ther service centres. And everybody I talked to was very polite, knowledgeable. But always deal directly with Compaq, I had some problems with their authorised service centres.
All in all, I strongly recommend the Armada M700 series.
Dirk
You can turn SpeedStep features off in the BIOS,the OS doesn't matter much...
my dell inspiron laptops both work flawlessly, and I recommend them highly. especially since they can do 1600x1200 and have a 32mb gf2go card in them... I have never had any problems with pcmcia that you have had. *shrug*
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
The only thing that doesn't work is the internal winmodem (although they will sell you and pre-configure a pcmcia modem) and the TV out. The box is 1G PIII and can be supplied with up to 1G of memory and has a very pleaant 1400x1024 TFT screen. My workstation has been sitting in a cupboard for some time now...
The only Good System is a Sound System
I am really happy with my HP Omnibook 500. I have two hard drives, one with Win2k and one with Debian (sid) and it is really easy to swap the hard drives (I don't even keep them screwed in place.
The omnibook500 is 3.5 lbs and one inch thick. the 12.1 inch screen is perfect for me. The USB is great, and powers some high-current USB devices from the laptop battery for 2 hours. I get 3.5 hours normally.
Debian works like a charm, recognizing every feature that I have cared to try. Best of all, you can find them starting at $1000 for a 500MHz model, up to 2400 for a 750MHz model. I recently bought a second one for $1600 w/ 700MHz and a base with CDROM. This does make the debian install much easier. (Previously I had to take the hard drive out and with a special cable, put the tiny IDE drive in my tower computer to start the install, and then slap it in the omnibook at that point in the Debian install where you reboot and continue the installation)
The only drawback is it uses a Mobility M1 Rage from ATI which doesn't have any 3D X support. (It doesn't even do OpenGL very well in the first place) I still prefer it to the latest and greatest Geforce 2go and related laptops from Toshiba. The quality and style of the HP Omnibook 500 is just right for me.
-Jim
Celebrate Excellence!
That's only true if:
I withheld the need to use GUI text editors for a long time. vi has everything I need and with tools like ispell, I was fine. My first GUI office suite was StarOffice. I've been using it without problem since 1998.
I tried using MS Office XP recently for work and found it was difficult and hard to use. Why? Because I know StarOffice and I keep thinking in terms of StarOffice. Since MS Office doesn't act the same, I don't like it.
Where am I going? There is no truth to the statement that MS Office is the best. It may be the best for you, but not for everyone. I'm personally waiting for OpenOffice to get the Mac OS X version ready so I can ditch MS Office.
AFAIK, they've sold out of a lot of places now, but you might still find them (at clearance prices, natch!) in the shops. Almost everything works; the exceptions are the modem (AMR Lucent/Agere controllerless) and power management (only APM power off and DPMS seem to work).
Red Hat 7.2 needs to be setup in text mode and the nVidia driver added post-install to support the geforce 2go (even TV out works). The built-in ethernet is an RTL8139. USB works out of the box.
Infra-Red also works and I have it happily talking to a Nokia 6210.
One potential 'gotcha' is that there are no PS/2 or serial ports. Depending on your intended use, this may be something of a showstopper as serial PC-cards are quite expensive and USB serial adaptors aren't reputed to be terribly compatible with all serial devices.
--
I've been thinking I'd like to get the qlitech king whenever I have the money. Pre-installed Debian sounds like a win. Anybody have experience buying through them?
I just use the scroll button as a middle button. I like having a three-button mouse.
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My mother wants a laptop, and I think one of these will be the choice.
However, I want built-in Bluetooth support, and a Crusoe and DDR RAM would be nice too.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
And when Microsoft decides that it's no longer in their interest to support Mac (say, after the trial is over) then they will drop support for Mac and your machine will become a boat anchor.
M$ won't wait that long. As part of Mac shipping IE as the default and not allowing Netscape on the first boot desktop, M$ supports Office and Outlook for Mac until August of this year. That is right - the guarantee of continued support that was discussed in the antitrust trial ends in 5 months.
Be interesting to see the response of M$. MAc is going to seriously start eating into their desktop advantage with OSx - better multimedia, and just as good (or better) for Office and IE.