Slashdot Mirror
Linux on Laptops Manufacturer Report Card
Werner Heuser writes "At MobiliX there is a survey of app. 100 laptop manufacturers and their Linux status available now. It contains a list of manufacturers, which are the most popular with Linux users. And some criticism about misleading manufacturer announcements for Linux support. The survey finishes with hints to laptop certifications, independent vendors and how to get rid of the "Microsoft Tax". And finally there is a A-Z list of almost 100 manufacturers and their Linux status. Besides Linux also other UniXes are mentioned and some hints about laptops with other CPUs than from Intel are included."
Compare to Linux.org's laptop page.
Checking back, I'm not surprised to see the submitter is from the site. I couldn't imagine a reader thought it was worth telling anyone about. Give him honesty points, at least.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well this link was a lot less interesting than the writeup!
All there is to see here is some guy's web analysis of what type of laptop people on his site search for.
There's a link to the now archaic windows refund site. There's a few blurbs about laptop companies that abandoned linux over the past few years. Finally there are some links to laptop manufacters and related open source projects.
Nothing really special, and nothing that isn't presented elsewhere in a cleaner, more useful format. Good "web-ring" material.
The top 20 list admits to being flawed, and the data there is pretty scarce, hardly a story.
To be on topic, I'm using a little Presario 725US w/ 1.4 GHz. Athlon. Pretty good price/performance, and works well with linux out of the box...
Of course, to get the most out of it, I have patched the kernel for PowerNow and ACPI, to extend battery life, reduce heat, and lower fan noise. Also applied a 'kacpid' patch to kernel to recover lost acpi interrupts. Because it has no builtin support for suspend, I also have the swsup patch applied. The sound also required a patch to actually work. The savage chipset driver with XFree I replaced with a more up-to-date version with better performance, but no matter what the driver locks up when xv attributes are set, so I have to patch xine to run it and RealOne is out of the question...
Ok, so it isn't *that* great out of the box but it was a hell of a lot cheaper than the competition out there and the end result is a solid system, at a price of 1200 new (at the time, after rebate).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The article is on laptops not desktops. I feel safe in guessing 99% percent of laptop users bought a prebuilt system. When you're putting Linux/BSD on a laptop, you want don't want a barebones system. You want a decent and popular system that might even have manufacturer support.
Someone managed to get their advertisement posted on the front page of slashdot, probably for free. Look at the link on the story reporter's name: It is the same as the site with the so-called survey of linux laptop machines. Essentially, the guy wanted to do some self promotion and the slashdot editors fell for it (or were paid to get into it.)
I have a dell Inspiron 2600. I wanted to run FreeBSD on it, but had to settle for Linux (no trolling intended) because it plain just wouldn't boot. However, I cannot get XFree86 working properly on it. It seems that it is the fault of the video card (intel i830M) uses system memory and "steals" it. Well, suffice it to say, it doesn't work perfectly. I can only get 1MB of video memory (the default).
There is a workaround here. (for a different laptop, but same video card). Damn it, if Dell would just fucking fix their bios to allow more "stolen" memory everything would be find. Chalk one up for corporate stupidity. Its an easy fix, and they choose not to do it. Fuck you dell.
(I am now a disgruntled dell owner that is kicking himself for not doing more research)
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
There is this technological wonder called Google (I shall keep the exact URL secret, lest the unwashed masses learn about it), which told me that here there be a HowTo...
Pretty funny! Interesting that they couldn't find NatureTech's real homepage
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
I have a recient iBook that dual boots Debain and OS X. There are a bunch of distros that I can think of off the top of my head that work on it: LinuxPPC [defunct?], Debian, Yellow Dog Linux [Red Hat based], and SuSE. The dual boot setup is pretty easy for those with linux experience, a guid is available here. I have to give Apple props for the case design, among other things. My only complaints are the 8meg ATI Rage 128 Mobility [it lags a bit] and a soft modem which is unusable under Linux. I got the AirPort card to work {kernel compile), but the lack of a modem irks me because in having a laptop portability is a must and that includes having a working modem. Overall I am happy with my purchase, BUT a PowerBook G4 would be nice... Oh yeah, when you buy an Apple you avoid the Microsoft Tax completely (and it comes with a nice *NIX preinstaled too!) =)
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
This web site has almost no useful information, like most Linux on laptops pages.
About all you can do is read current user reports, and buy the laptop from place that will take it back without asking questions.
"Star Wars Moral Number 17: Teddy bears are dangerous in herds."
yes it depends. for me I had the lucent winmodem with the Mars chipset which has linux support. its a package called ltmodem. google it. I personally use 6.00c2 and it works.
Here is a very good laptop reference for Mandrake users.