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."
Hmmmm, is it just me or does it seem like slashdot is begining to report more and more on almost usless news from sites that just so happen to sell things.
I think it's just me, so don't mod me down.
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...
But ok alot and I mean alot of the *nix users are techies or are heavy in the computer field. And if you really know anything about computers it is usually cheaper and better if you buy a barebone system with no OS on it so why would you mass produce systems with a *nix OS on it when alot of the pubic *nix users don't by prebuilts? Correct me if I am wrong, please, as I see it there really isn't that great of demand for any *nix OS'on prebuilts.
Although it is great to see large companies supporting Linux on their platforms, I think in the end, the best support would come from local companies. For people who are not fluent with Linux, it would be hard for a large comany to even support them. But if they had a setup, in which smaller vendors could carry, sell, and support their products, specifically a Linux program, they could target smaller groups of people more efficiently. Smaller, more tagerted support would greatly help increase the abilities to integrate Linux into the everyday computer environment.
If you scroll down the list to NatureTech, you will find that their notebook's SPARC chips are not only powerful enough for Solaris, but good for you too!
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 "report card" seems to be missing an important aspect: namely, grades! There's nothing here that indicates how "friendly" a company or laptop is toward Linux. This looks more like an attempt to boost page views; or maybe stress-test the server? :)
:Peter
For example, the "Naturetech" laptop maker. Go to the website listed in the article. I think you'll be surprised at how far Linux has branched out.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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.
...or better yet, compare to linux-laptop.net.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I have a Sony Vaio PCG-FXA35, with the AMD 1.0GHz chip in it . Absolutely wonderful Linux notebook, with one exception: the battery life is 30 minutes *or less* when running Linux...which pretty much means it has to be plugged in all the time.
The source of the problem, as far as I can tell, is the lack of Linux support for ACPI, which appears to be the successor to APM. The laptop has no power management configurability in the BIOS, it all must be done in software. There is no Linux software that I know of that will do this, and altering settings in WinXP appears to only affect the power usage when running WinXP.
If anyone has any suggestions, I'd most appreciate hearing them. At this point though, I think my next laptop will be a Titanium powerbook, as they appear to have pretty good Java support, 5 hrs of battery life, instant-on/off, and run a BSD-based OS.
The link provided less info than any usual Ask Slashdot ...
Anyways, I have a Fujitsu-Siemens C Series laptop bought in Germany a year and a half ago (Celeron 450 Mhz, 192 MB RAM). I still use it as my main computer at home and work running only Linux. I have installed almost every flavor of linux and works perfectly, but lately have only used Mandrake: easy install and autodetects everything, from sound card to video, modem and ethernet card.
Even if it is almost two years old it works like the first day with Mandrake 8.1, KDE 3.0 and Forte & Eclipse (and i have dropped it to the floor twice). I even run JBoss in the background while working with Eorte or Eclipse and it runs perfect. No slowdown. If I were a XP or 2000 user this machine would have gone the trash way a long time ago. God bless linux.
I Must recommend this laptop as one of the bests I have seen, and when I buy a new one next month I'm gonna get a Fujitsu-Siemens.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
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.
whan is someone going to get Linux running on one of these bad boys?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
and getting a Thinkpad. I was saddened to see that IBM doesn't directly support Linux on a laptop anymore. I don't think this market is very popular in general, even though the possible hardware variations are far smaller than in desktops and there fore easier to support.
Has anyone run any distro on a Thinkpad A31?
-1 Offtopic SpanishInquisition: wasn't expecting you.
Especially in the posititve integers.
One of your fans will no doubt mod you down for envy soon enough...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
D'oh... little hasty on the "Enter" key there
What I meant to say was, yeah, that was a completely pointless site to go to. Along the theme of it though, if you're (seriously) looking for a *nix laptop of some type, you really, really need to take a look at Apple's Powerbooks.
Feel free to mark me -1, Redundant, but Apple's laptops are probably the best in the industry hardware/design wise, run cooler than most x86 boxes, have faster chips that most PC laptops, and run a full-fledged *nix operating system, with a big giant company and a growing user base to support it.
If you're willing to open your mind (and your pocketbook a little - but come on, you're buying a laptop!) it's hard to go wrong with one of those.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Huh? What's illegal about installing another OS without booting Windows and asking for a refund of the unused Microsoft OS? I'm also curious as to how the act of buying a laptop can possibly create a "contract" between the buyer and Microsoft.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Weird that they barely mention Apple and the PowerBook. Last year at the O'Reilly Open Source convention, basically everyone was packing a PowerBook or iBook.
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
I'm somewhat actively looking for a laptop to run Linux, but I've found the various websites mentioned to be far from useful. It seems that laptop models change about every three months or so.
For instance: I looked at CompUSA selling an HP Pavilion zt1250. I haven't found any linux/laptop site which mentions this model. Not only this, but HP's website has no listing for this model at all, not even an historical reference.
I get the feeling that, as a general rule, by the time someone gets Linux up and running on a new model, that model is no longer being manufactured.
A lot of pages I find about running linux on a laptop tend to say things like: works great out of the box, except for sound, X, modem, network, and power management.
Rocks, 99% of the hardware works with little or no special attention after a RH 7.2 install. Battery life is a little less it seems but when I need Linux on the laptop its for network diagnostics and usually I solve a problem there quite quickly. Dual booting with XP via GRUB... I'm quite impressed, any questions?
I'm wondering where they got their list of computer manufacturers. They included Commodore, who has been out of business for a decade! Other companies they list that no longer exist or no longer make (laptop) PCs are CompuAdd, Escom, Hunday, TI, AST, Digital, Quantex, and Zenith. I'm sure there are more in the list. This is just pitiful -- one of the most useless pieces of mis-information I've seen on the Web.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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."
As for the Windows tax on laptops, I suggest buying refurbished models. Where I've gotten mine (including that HP 800CT), they seem to have two tiers of laptops. The higher cost ones have relatively recent hardware and come with Windows 98 or more recent, and the lower cost ones - about $200 to $500 - have older procesors like Pentiums and don't include an OS. (OK, there's DOS on the drive, but no Windows.)
If you write me, I'll be happy to tell you their URL, though curiously, their laptop stock seems quite low right now.
This very thing happened to me. I was new to installing Linux in late 1999, had no idea what the issues might be. I spent about a month reading as much as I could about laptop models, from manufacturer brochures to the various difficult-to-read "linux on laptops" pages. (They were clearly more oriented to people who already knew what to do and how to do it.)
I ended up settling on a Compaq Presario 1925, for which someone had posted what appeared to be pretty clear directions for getting Linux installed. Then I went to the store, where they had a 1930, bigger hard disk and DVD, and the guy offered me the same price. I was no fool, right?
Turns out that what wasn't in the brochure was a video chip "upgrade" in the 1925 to the 1930 to a chip that had no XFree86 drivers. Took an MIS manager friend of mine a couple days to figure out what happened.
D'oh!
Rather than return the laptop, though, I waited for a new driver to be released. Two months later, there it was. The thing's been a dream since. (I have it dual-boot with the original Win98 because I need Win98 for my employer's software.)
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
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.
I appreciate the answer.
S3 verge/ savage cards a common in laptops,
Xfree drivers for S3 cards have just started to appear in the DRI CVS
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I have never ever had an AMD CPU go bad, this FUD annoys me. I've had models from their 286 way back when, to the Athlon XP, and not one of them ever showed a hint of a problem. The K6 series underperformed, but still ran solid as could be... More than I can say for the two intel processors I bought, one which had the fdiv bug and the other which had the F00F bug.... I know, two exceptions to intel quality, but don't pretend AMD is a piece of crap while glossing over Intel's flaws..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.