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The State of Laptop Linux In 2005
jg21 writes "LinuxWorld's senior editor James Turner reports this month on what he calls The State of Laptop Linux in 2005 and says it's a lot better than it was in 2004, but adds - after conducting his own new test to see if any Linux distro is yet really laptop-ready: "What's needed to make things better? Well, the Linux community needs to address the device driver crisis." Turner acknowledges that binary-only drivers are a sore spot with free software purists, but says he'd "rather have a fully functional, if closed, Nvidia driver than a reverse-engineered one that limps along." Overall though he concludes that widespread laptop Linux is much closer now."
From the article:
Heh...I could have told him what he did wrong...I had the exact same issue when I tried to install Fedora on my Toshiba. It took me a lot of flopping around (two reinstalls) to identify and fix the issue, but now Fedora works like a charm.
I'm guess I'm not suprised to not see Ubuntu among his tests, although I am definitely disappointed...after reading the release notes on HH, I've decided to go with it on my laptop, but I would have liked to have a guinea p^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsomeon else test it out first...especially on a Toshiba.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The vendors currently see enough profit in binary-only drivers; thus, when you buy for that manufacture then you are supporting that plan.
How would you like to participate in a kind of wiki open architecture development where you can tweak the plans for hardware? When the plans are in a good enough state you could then send it to a vendor to manufacture one for you - don't think it is crazy because this is similar to how apple started. When enough people start buying into this than the scales of economy would be realized. I say that the EE community has to step up and support an open architecture just as the SE community.
Until that time, vendors will see no reason to give you more details about *their* hardware.
http://www.emperorlinux.com/
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
Until laptop Linux becomes more popular, the manufacturers will continue to save money by only supplying drivers for Windows.
And until the manufacturers start making the investment in Linux driver development, the Linux market will remain small.
Linux on Laptops is a great resource for how-tos on getting your specific model of laptop working, there are some other sites as well (linux.org), and while they aren't the best updated they helped me at least get linuxs working on my D600 very well. Also its a good spot to check to see if you particular laptop model is generally supported.
The Linux community would address the driver crisis...if it were legal to do so or the hardware specs were available! Blame your freakin' manufacturer. Not developers that would gladly write drivers if they had the information to do so!
Binary drivers aren't a solution no matter how badly he thinks they are. They're of questionable legality considering the nature of the GPL, and no developer will help you with them given that they're a black box at best.
I may not agree with the prohibition of binary drivers but I understand why the Linux team won't deal with them...
Is there any laptop that 100% compatible with linux?
...is working flawlessly. It sees all the hardware, it installed quickly, and everything I need is running beautifully. I've got VMware installed with the work image in it, so I can use it for everything I need. There wasn't anything special that I had to do outside the normal Gentoo installation - it worked like a charm!
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
I've been using various versions of SUSE on my Dell Laptop for the last eighteen months (and many other distros also).
After wrestling with Red Hat, Mandrake, Slack and Gentoo, my laptop finally found a home with SUSE Professional.
It "just works"; therefore, I spend more time working and less time messing around trying to force things to work?
Whilst I do enjoy messing around with various distros, the time does come when I need to get work done, and SUSE lets me do this, including (almost) seamless co-operation with my company Windows-LAN?
Just my 0.02 Euros worth.....
-- Seamus
Talking about video drivers shows how much Linus is not ready for the Laptop. If this is a problem, how much are audio, USB, FireWire, and WLAN are going to be a problem? I'm working in a CS department and most people I know don't even try to get Linux running on their laptop. (That's also why Apple's OS X on iBooks and PowerBooks becomes more and more popular around here.)
At the beginning was at.
More than anything else, even more than Microsoft, closed drivers will be the downfall of Linux and open source. First they lock you in and then they rip the rug from under you.
Drivers are too low level and critical to the entire OS. Drivers aren't like some accounting app that you can get by without. When the ATI and nVidia say, we can't be bothered with writing Linux drivers anymore, but we still won't open the source, what are you going to do?
See Bitkeeper...
My last remaining sore spot is sleep. I've tried everthing I can figure to get suspend-to-ram (aka sleep) working. It never wakes up correctly.
And I place the blame SQUARELY on the BIOS manufacturers. From what I can see, they're cutting corners left and right because it "works with Windows".
Not to mention the TERRIBLE tech support Avereatec has given me, even with regard to Windows problems. They haven't released drivers for this noteboook yet, claiming their re-install procedure works flawlessly (it doesn't). Right now, Linux runs better on this machine that Windows.
You could call up Dell and have an Inspiron with Red Hat delivered.
'course that was before Bill Gates made some subtle hints to Michael Dell. Dell soon dropped Linux desktop/laptop support.
Turner acknowledges that binary-only drivers are a sore spot with free software purists, but says he'd "rather have a fully functional, if closed, Nvidia driver than a reverse-engineered one that limps along."
I would have to agree with this - at least as far as my own systems are concerned. I appreciate the idea (and ideals) of F/OSS but do not pursue that single idea doggedly enough to ignore functionality. No single ideology can encompass all possible situations; open source can - and must, in many cases - co-exist peacefully next to closed source and commercial software.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Has full laptop support.
Dashboard Widgets
If only binary-only drivers were fully functional. It seems that they often are not, because less time is devoted to them compared to the windows drivers. I was not a purist in this regard, but have become more and more suspicious of binary-only drivers. Plus they complicate upgrading my Debian installation.
[i]Turner acknowledges that binary-only drivers are a sore spot with free software purists, but says he'd "rather have a fully functional, if closed, Nvidia driver than a reverse-engineered one that limps along." [/i]
Pfff. Again someone misses the example of the quality and performance of a completely open source DRI radeon/r200 driver. And before anyone says it sucks, let me remind them to try the latest CVS checkout, and they'll find it's performance and stability is breathtaking -- on par or beats the ATI sactioned version. To me, it's simply better.
The iBook G4. If only apple would release info on the wireless card! That is the only down-er to the apple laptops running linux: no wifi drivers right now. Small, portable, half the price of other laptops of similar size and features.
Finally! I was getting tired of every year since 1998 being the year of 'Linux on the desktop'
While I've been moderately successful adopting linux on my laptop. But on my desktop where I have some top of the line hardware only windows works.
My biggest issue currently is that linux doesn't support high resolutions well. Running a monitor in 1920 X 2900 just isn't possible. Even running the probe in the xconfigurator blows the system up. Why can't drivers just work on linux?
that many things work "98%". E.g., when I installed Fedora Core on my g/f laptop, it worked out of the box, including support for sound, the VGA etc.
/etc/fstab, and mount it (or have it plugged in at startup)
But then I noticed
- that I had to give a kernel parameter at boot (including manually editing grub.conf) to get full functionality for the keypad
- that everytime the USB-printer is not plugged CUPS goes into "Error/Stop" mode and must be reactivated manually (via the web interface). This is just annoying.
- that to use the USB stick and camera, I had to manually add an entry to
Those are no problem for me as a long-time Linux user but are just annoying. Plus, for the simple casual user, it may just look if "printer, usb stick and mousepad just don't work".
Also often these annoyances are known and seemingly part of a higher philosophic approach. E.g, the CUPS behaviour has come up at the mailing list multiple times, and they said it's the expected behaviour.
Does anyone have any experience with running Yellow Dog linux on a powerbook? I'm going to try it out in the next month or so, but I'd be interested to hear what people have to say about it.
I wonder how that compares to running various distros on a PC laptop...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Yep, back a page and down one article. Ubuntu has been a great laptop disto. For all the problems reported with Dells it worked (wireless too) out of the box.
Works great! A few things don't work, like some of the function keys, the svideo, etc. But overall it works great for me. My biggest complaint about linux (desktop/laptop) is bootup time. WinXP will have my laptop on a desktop in 30 seconds. Linux takes over 2 minutes.
This space available for rent.
What's the point of having a kickass Linux/NVidia comp/laptop if you can't play games? Sure there's Wesnoth, Tux Racer, and thank god Doom3 came out for Linux, but Linux is still missing Counter-Strike, WoW, etc.
Linux computers can have the most incredible overclocking system but if there's nothing to use that NVidia card for, it'd be better to get a basic graphics card for your coding.
I have gentoo running on my HP NX7010. Everything works well, the ati graphic issues are better since ATI released new drivers.
System is a 1.7ghz centrino which makes my 3.06ghz ht desktop (running Windows XP) seem like a dinosaur. Installation was very easy emerge this...emerge that... and finally a nice working system. If it weren't for certain applications that don't work under wine, I would move the desktop over to gentoo as well.
from my fully-functional linux laptop, I can't help but wonder the same thing. } // end sarcasm
but yeah, there are alot of drivers out there. hopefully companies will see intel's success with Centrino (ipw2100.sf.net) and follow suit.
Power to the Penguin!
This advice has been given before but it is good advice. Try a bootable cd distro like Knoppix on a laptop before you buy it.
The Mandrake 9.1 on my ancient Thinkpad died and I used a Knoppix disk to recover. The Knoppix worked so well that I just installed it. In the case of the article Suse was the one that worked. This has to be WAY easier than trying to install Slackware. I almost wonder why the author tried that. Well, I guess he's just way more l337 than I am.
yes, we have insightful first posts that are on topic and well thought out and contribute to a higher quality of slashdot, rather than "first post beeee-yatch!" type of garbage. How Horrible!
The exact same article will be written. And again in 2007, and again in 2008..
Unless something dramatic happens, I don't see linux ever having anything close to universal wireless support, or support for the umpteen million other specialty hardwares in a laptop.
I tried linux on this gateway laptop about six months ago. I couldn't get the touchpad working, it wouldn't recognize the lid switch to put it into hibernate mode (or even force a shutdown), I couldn't get the RCA-out to work (I like to use it as a portable DVD player on the road). I had trouble getting sound to work, but that's about par for the course with ALSA. It can be a real PITA to get something as common as an SBLive to work. The Radeon Mobility wouldnt work right with ATI's drivers, so I was stuck with the SVGA driver.
It's a problem the manufacturers have to solve, the stuff is all proprietary, and they aren't about to open all the hardware to let kernel hackers at it - especially not WRT to the wireless chipsets. There's just not enough benefit (ie; customers) to warrant the cost of a dedicated linux support staff.
Sad but true...
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I like what this guy said about binary drivers. I admit that it would be nice if we had open source drivers for everything but in the real world that just isn't going to happen - at least not in the near future. Companies like nVidia just can't see any benifit to open sourcing their drivers and I can quite understand that.
What we (the Linux comunity) should do is accept that there are going to be binary drivers (this will involve some people pulling their head out of the sand) and make it as easy as possible for hardware manufacturers to write drivers while still encouraging openness and adherance to standards. Very few hardware manufacturers will write drivers that need to be updated and tweeked every couple of months becuse the cost is just to high so we need a rock solid API that is well documented and has a documented change policy. Perhaps that exists already, I'm not that familiar with the exact kernel development process, but it doesn't seem like it is based on others comments.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I am running Fedora Core 3 on my Dell 8600. I have had zero problems. Heck, the only drivers I had to install after I was done installing FC3 was ipw2200 drivers and ati 9600 drivers (so I could actually use 3D.)
This thing runs smoother then it did under Windows for sure. My only complaint is the problems I had getting WPA to work with the ipw2200 drivers.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I run Debian, so I'd be much more interested in articles on the state of laptop linux in 2004. I'll be there in a few months, with any luck.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
By delivering binary-only drivers, manufacturers can only support a very small fraction of the amount of different possible configurations. Now, since a huge percentage of users only use a very small set of possible configurations, that is ok for most people -- but it makes it much more difficult for someone to investigate other options.
Practical examples abound: off course most manufacturers only deliver drivers for windows, but also vendors that support linux with binary-only drivers usually support only a few kernels / distributions. Running linux on something other than x86 (such as an ibook) is completely unsupported.
If you want to have choice in what you buy and run, don't support binary only drivers. Don't buy WLAN devices that can only be gotten to work with ndiswrapper. Support manufacurers that do give code or documentations to the community. And be vocal: make sure that unwilling vendors know that this is important for us.
Jan
Mandriva 10.0 installer crashes on my laptop, Mandriva 10.1 does the same thing.
Those prices almost made me choke on my coffee. If I could afford to pay 2x as much for a laptop, I guess I'd love getting a fully supported machine.
As it is though, my $1000 Averatec works for everything but sleeep; and I know it didn't take me $1k of time to get it that way, either.
have a list of laptops with sublist of supported, partially supported(with detail), and unsupported hardware on each. Rather than mess with binary drivers which are their own can-O-wormz I'll just buy the machine which doesn't use any PITA, becuz the detailed specs ain't published, hardware.
Hell, if you're gonna get the most out of your laptop/notebook, you're gonna want to eamine the hardware carefully BEFORE making a purchase.
Right now running:
FC3 with kernel compiled for Fujitsu P2120.
uname -srvmpio
Linux 2.6.11.7monkey-brain-soup #1 Fri Apr 8 02:18:40 EDT 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
>> - that to use the USB stick and camera, I had to manually add an entry to /etc/fstab, and mount it (or have it plugged in at startup) >>
HAL + DBUS + GNOMEVFS
I plug in a USB stick or a Sony camera and it's automatically loaded in (stick is explored, camera triggers a dialogue asking to import the photos) without adding anything to fstab.
While it's one of the faster more traditional distros you really need to look to Suse, Mandrake etc to look at the state of Linux on laptops. Since these distros are able to auto detect the hardware in most laptops.
If these distros can't install a well configured Linux system onto a laptop then you can forget widespread Linux on laptop usage.
While you can manually configure and compile all manner of software to gradually bring your Linux laptop to full functionality with Slackware this approach is vastly outdated and for the hardcore Linux geek.
Until Linux is a simple grandmother-friendly install, desktop Linux is going to stay in the ghetto
No its going to stay in the ghetto until OEMs bundle it. Could your grandmother install Windows?
I'm sick of this "No one uses desktop Linux because its hard to install". Patently untrue, Linux installs are generally easier IMHO, one reboot as opposed to 3 with Windows (and that's not counting updates!).
Software producers don't make business apps or games for Linux because people aren't using Linux.
People aren't using it because it doesn't come bundled and the OEMs don't sell it because the games and the business apps just aren't there. Until someone solves the chicken and the egg problem there won't be a lot of Linux desktop growth.
Honeslty that's fine with me. Linux works on my desktop and does what I need it to do. I've also gotten it to work fine on several laptops I don't know what this author's problem is!
The Anti-Blog
If binary drivers are OK, why would a company bother releasing source? If one company can release binary only, why not the other? Under the current attitude, companies stand to gain a lot more than they would with binary only.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
This is why I got a PowerBook. Enough said.
The story, although concluding that the state of linux laptops in 2005 'is a lot better' than in 2004, says an awful lot of nice things about SuSE 9.1, in spite of it being an April 2004 distribution. And Linspire 4.5 is, according to distrowatch, from December 2003.
It would be nice if a 2005 test actually used the 2005 versions of the distros (eg. Linspire 5.0 and SuSE 9.3)
On another note, I do find it somewhat disappointing that Ubuntu was omitted from the test. I recently tried the LiveCD and it seemed very much laptop ready.
I installed Xandros on the laptop and it was a thing of beauty. I had two PCMCIA wireless cards (a Cisco and an older one that slips my mind - I'm at home posting this before work). I put the Cisco one in first and configured it to connect to our wireless network (through the nice GUI interface). It auto-detected the card upon insertion, grabbed an IP address and we were off and running. Then, just for kicks, while in the middle of a surfing session, I yanked the Cisco card our and popped the other one in. The system chirped upon removal and insertion and my surfing continued unhindered! I couldn't believe it.
It's working so well, that I'm even loaning it to someone from another department (with no Linux background) to take with her on a business trip so she can do some work while she's at her convention. She said she's sick of dealing with all the "problems" her employees have been having with their Windows stations, and if this does everything she needs, she'll switch her department too. Since it's just basic WordProcessing/Spreadsheet, Email and web access they need, I'm sure she'll find this a great alternative.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
I have been using Ubuntu Linux (Hoary Hedgehog) on my laptop for the past month without any problems. I have a Dell Inspiron 510m. All hardware detected and working... which was better than Windows XP, as I had to hunt for drivers... :-)
If you hadn't noticed already, Ubuntu 5.04 has just been released, and should you lot stop /.ing it, I will be able to apt-get dist-upgrade and be a happy user. :-)
"The state of Linux on my Toshiba, 2005"
Come on, even for slashdot generalizing from a single datapoint is a little underwhelming.
Sorry, it works great here, on decent hardware which the manufacturer supports on Linux.
Linux sure as hell does depend on the BIOS for ACPI stuff, and the problem sure as hell is that they only test it against Windows.
id rate you insightful if i could, but my karma is bad
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. - HHGTTG
The importance of a piece of software being open source depends on the degree to which users and other software depend on it, since this determines the degree of lock-in.
- If the software is used by many users and has a non-trivial UI then it would be better if it were open source.
- More importantly though, if the software exposes an API and lots of other software is built on top of it (eg. a part of the OS) then it is important that it be open source.
The reason for this is because these factors determine the degree of lock-in. If there is no user interface, and no other software is built on top of it, then there is very little lock-in and the software can easily be replaced in the future.
For this reason, closed source drivers should be accepted.
which is the most important thing for Linux-on-laptop. When I got Gentoo to hibernate (and wake up - important too ;-) on my Fujitsu, that was a happy day.
Unless something dramatic happens, I don't see linux ever having anything close to universal wireless support, or support for the umpteen million other specialty hardwares in a laptop.
First, Windows doesn't support wireless. The wireless manufacturer supports Windows. If they treated MS users like they treat Linux users, Windows would have the exact same issues
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Hey, it isn't Linux only, the BSDs too. Remember the stories about Theo trying to get documentation to support things like RAID controllers or WiFi chips. And it can be seen as radicalism... but why then code FOSS OSes? Binary drivers for this and that... then chip makers giving binary schedulers, and oops, all binary. It's just about been logical for what you are doing: FOSS OSes. If you can be happy with binary drivers, why are you using FOSS software? Vote with your money and make noise so the issue is well know, companies would prefer to offer not products but get money anyway.
First of all, no problems here running/installing Fedora 3 (3.90 even) on an old Aristo laptop. The only one thing that makes me mad about its inability to be luser-friendly is the fact I cannot use the touchpad and an external mouse simultaneously and transparently. Just try installing Windows 95 on a laptop. Touchpad working. Hotplug a PS/2 mouse. Working. Both. Never seen a linux that does that, yet.
I got a powerbook after they were updated in Feburary. I was all set to wipe OS X and install Debian on it. In fact I did, and afterwords I couldn't, for the life of me, get the the mouse to work. This is my original post to the debian powerpc list:
g 00180.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2005/02/ms
It turns out they changed their touchpad significantly for the newest versions of the powerbook. I eventually gave up and started using OS X. I'm pretty happy with it, but it's still a little different.
So if you have a newer powerbook (bought since Febuary), I'd look in to the mouse problem before I considered installing linux (yellow dog or otherwise).
-- john
And it doesn't help when some of the icons that are set up on install don't work and don't give feedback as to why.
It's not like it's an impossible problem to solve, OSX and Windows software installs are pretty simple for grandma. You run the installer and it puts an icon in the menu/desktop/whatever. Seems like the package control system needs to be integrated with wichever desktop is installed. If the other guys can do it, the distributions should be able to as well.Oh, and fixing up USB keyboard support would be nice too. (was going to try out the new vector 5 soho, but couldn't get past go because of my USB keyboard. Tried VLOS 1.1 instead and was not too impressed.)
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Must be nice to work in a place where you don't care about budget and do things like product spamming for the major product spammers on /.
Do you really work at a school or do you free-lance for Apple marketting?
You product-troll you.
More trolling here by Apple marketting.
When the Intel Centrino CPU's get to 2.5 Ghz (maybe in late 2006), I'll consider getting a new Dell and will put Linux on it again. My experience with Linux on a Dell laptop has been superb.
quote from article: ------- Until Linux is a simple grandmother-friendly install, desktop Linux is going to stay in the ghetto, restricted to people who don't panic at the words "patch and recompile the kernel." ------- ok i can somewhat agree with this but what about the users like myself that know myself around windows? yeah you have to worry about grandma but if you are really going to tap into the windows market you need to have a VALID reason for us to switch. i am a gamer, i work with video production stuff at home too so i use most of the adobe products and make custom DVD's. you might tell me i can switch because of security issues. well i have XP Pro at home, never have had 1 virus since i got the system 1 year ago, not one "blue screen" or system crash. Even when i push the system with Maya and Photoshop running and doom 3 minimized and 3 or4 IE windows open it runs smoothly. furthermore i leave the machine on 24/7 unless there is a reason to reboot to update video card drivers or some new installtion or an update for my firewall. i think i can speak for a lot of my friends that use windows as well.. also in the business world people that use microsoft that keep there systems stable and safe. so how would you sell me to use Linux? notice i said i use windows at home but i work we use windows but also linux and mac so its not that i have a fear of linux.
If laptop manufacturers would make more laptops with LESS built into it, I think people would have a much better time with Linux. Build me a laptop without an integrated modem, ethernet, and wireless network and just give me a bunch of usb and PCMCIA slots so I can choose my own accessories, much like I do with my desktop. That way I can spend less on a laptop because it doesn't "come with everything" and I can expand it with exactly the hardware I want.
I have an old Digital HiNote VP 700 with no built in modem or ethernet card. I poked around online to see what PCMCIA devices are supported by my favorite flavor of Linux, and I bought those items. Machine runs slow as shit with a 133 mhz processor and Red Hat 9, but at least all my hardware works because I found the modem, ethernet, and wireless cards that work well with what I want to run. I am also happy using generic video drivers as long as I get the resolution I want.
To compare, I have a Toshiba Tecra with built in Ethernet, Modem, and Wireless. First off, Fedora Core 3 locks up on bootup, so I put RH9 on this one too. Wouldn't ya know it, the modem doesn't work, the 10/100 ethernet adaptor is detected but doesn't work, and I haven't even attempted the built in wireless. But I still have these cards I know work cause I researched them and picked them out myself, so I just shove em in and I'm good to go. Although RH9 was able to correctly determine my video and audio chipsets, I would be just as happy using generic video/audio drivers if I had to.
Sell me a laptop without everything built in so I can expand it myself...that's the way to make a Linux compatiable laptop.
Have you ever tried Mac OS X?
thats the real problem.
i only run computers that have open-source integrated circuits... in fact,
i also require the blueprints of the factory
that the motherboard came from, along with bills
of lading from the transporters, and the truckers
log books as well.
i do it for freedom.
I've been taking Knoppix CDs to shops here in Sydney to see if Debian will run on the 10.6" laptops available there (I commute; I'm looking for something ultra-portable). I drew a small crowd in one place by merely putting Xaos on Auto-zoom; It's interesting to see people's responses. As to results, not much yet; the Fujutsu's seem OK; the Vaio's I haven't been able to check yet (staff who don't know what Knoppix is are justfiably wary of booting strange disks).
that he says that what I've actually been doing very successfully for 2 years is just now becoming viable. Where do they get these so called experts?
I'm a software developer and have been running linux (exclusively) on my primary work computer (laptop) for two years without a hitch. None of my colleagues who run microsoft-based laptops can say that.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had driver issues/problems on any of the many different boxes (including laptops) I've installed Linux on. It has always detected whatever soundcard/mouse/keyboard/nic/drives are present without a hiccup. If I want hardware-accelerated 3D I just download/install the latest nvidia driver, which is exactly what I'd do for a windows box too.
Actually I find Linux is WAY easier to set up than a windows-based box, because you don't have to spend hours correcting all the microsoft dumbed-down settings, uninstalling bloatware, and fixing all the security holes in XP.
The only real issue I have is if I ever visit a store to buy buy addon hardware. I make a point of asking the store staff to double-check my purchase isn't windows-only (even if I already know), just to get them to realise there are other OS's in the world than windows. We need to provide the big stores with visibility of them repeatedly losing sales because of lack of Linux support.
If enough other Linux users do that too maybe Frys/CompUSA/BestBuy/PCWorld will start to demand Linux supported Hardware from the manufacturers. Those big stores are the guys with the real voices as far as the HW manfuacters are concerned.
'oh conserve energy, conserve the environment, what about the baby seals'.
look, real men carry a gasoline powered generator with them and plug that into their laptop. real REAL men carry a chainsaw with a dynamo on it so they can check email while they cut down 300 year old redwoods.
piss ant hippies like you are the problem with america, and why we got attacked by the terrorists.
To be considered a success, a distribution needed to install and all the laptop components needed to work without any software installs or changes to the kernel.
I don't know how reasonable that standard is. Although it may betray my Gentoo bigotry, I always thought that one of the most important things about Linux was that you could customize it to adapt to a specific purpose. I see the ability to adjust the kernel or install customized software as a benefit of Linux, not something to be excluded. It seems to me that if you restrict yourself to a platform that can do everything poorly right out of the box (assuming that you'll run windows without updating video or sound drivers), not only can Windows do a better job of that, there really is no reason at all to look at alternatives.
thing. now you get a +1. hrmph.
Everything works (including widescreen /w accelerated Nvidia driver, wireless, sound, ethernet, touchpad, USB, firewire, etc) except for the built-in cardreader, and the cruddy winmodem. A Xircom PCMCIA card allows me to still use dialup on the road, but it would be nice to have the internal modem work and it's annoying that there's no driver for the cardreader.
Being that the cardreader is a weird brand "ENE Technology Inc CB710" and the modem is, of course, a soundcard-linked winmodem... well I'm not really surprised at this point that they don't work.
If I really wanted to bitch though, I'd complain about the lack of proper native sound mixing support in the ALSA, etc drivers. A lot of laptop soundcards don't support hardware-mixing, and having sound available from one app-at-a-time is so 1990's...
How about drivers like NVidia wherein the driver is partly prebuilt, and partly compiled to allow working with your current kernel, etc.
Doesn't that way of doing things tend to lend better compatability?
Yes, it sucks.
Why can't I play a DVD in fullscreen mode? Why is there no API that lets me as a programmer put an application into fullscreen mode?
Because Jobs thinks that would make a computer too hard to use?
Frankly, it's all show and no go. If that's what you want out of your computer, go ahead. Not being able to actually watch a movie, or play a game fullscreen on my $1000 widescreen display is enough reason for me to not waste my time with it.
Frankly, I'd rather spend my money on a PC that does what I want, even if it doesn't have shiny airbrushed icons.
I'd also rather spend 350 on a PSP, or even an iRiver jukebox that plays movies, games, and mp3s, than that piece of junk iPod which can't even reproduce sound faithfully (look at some critical reviews of it's performance wrt bass).
Screw Apple. The iPod fad will wear off, and they'll sink right back into obscurity.
Hi.
Though knowing how notoriously bad Dell is with Linux support, I bought an Insipiron 600m anyway.
There's gentoo running on it, and everything works. Well, I don't think the modem works, but I have never had the occasion to use it. It could be working, for all I know.
And I mean, everything from cpu frequency scaling and suspend and hibernate, to stuff like the special touchpad features and 3D, native wifi drivers, all works fine.
I use Gentoo.
Point is, it depends on what you consider 'Support'. It is in most cases possible to make any device work on any distro.. It all depends on how much tinkering you are willing to put in. With Gentoo, you do your own configuration... I don't know how much of this stuff would have been picked up by the 'auto-hardware probe' scripts that come with most binary distributions.
Intel Pro Wireless adapters are pretty good supported. But they require proprietary firmware to installed into the OS. That's a little problem.
Second, most IBM ThinkPads suffer from Linux support in respest to their ACPI support. When using ACPI, the OS must switch off many components of the system on its own. That's a problem when using suspend to RAM. Most thinkpads consume ten times the power as they should.
Third, there should be user configuration tools to configure the functionality of ACPI buttons. For example: should the system hibernate when pressing the power off button or call a shutdown command?
Maybe, we just should develop our own open-sourced Linux hardware. *g*
Most ThinkPad laptops have good support for Linux. My work T41p has open source drivers for every single piece of hardware from Bluetooth to WiFi. I just wish it was possible to buy one without paying for a useless Windows license.
Linux on laptops is like Linux on any other piece of PC hardware--you need to buy hardware that has drivers; if you get some crappy proprietary hardware with no drivers available you're out of luck.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Works nicely, although you have to be VERY CAREFUL to append pci=BIOSIRQ to the kernel args, or the sound card and the HD have an arguement, and the HD loses.
Four months ago I decided to switch my laptop from Windows to *nix so I could have the same OS on my laptop and home server, following various security breaches (read:hacked to death) on the server in the past. After failing with FreeBSD and various small Linux distros which I wanted to install off a USB drive rather than CD, I finally decided on Fedora Core 3. Results: - video, audio, mouse, trackpad, keyboard work - annoying problems ejecting USB drives where it says it can't eject because its being used, even though it isn't (intentionally anyway) - got wifi working after about an hour's work - took over 2 weeks to get the winmodem working, following many emails and patches and various other bits and bobs. God knows how my gran would ever be able to get that working! - tried to get the pen-tablet bit working, but gave up after an hour. may try again in the future, but to be honest i dont use it much anyway - can't get sleep/suspend/hibernate to work. *very* annoying. spent about 3 hours or so with no luck. - can't get it so when I put a monitor in the VGA port I can toggle between that one, the laptop one and both together. haven't spend much time on this yet though, but *very* annoying - gui woes. originally just used gnome but installed kde for kate (php editing) and konqueror because gnome's file browser is so terrible and unconfigurable. but i still have to run gnome because kde keeps crashing on me, can't get it to work - openoffice doesn't open Access .mdb files. Very annoying. openoffice 2 beta keeps crashing and giving annoying 'recover file' dialog at startup
- less polish than windows
- programs, such as a file manager or firefox take longer to load than with windows
- program updates: I use yum to install all FC3 updates. but i only want updates which are security related - how can I set this? doesn't seem to be a way at all. also, on dial-up, its *extremely* annoying to have to download an entire program just for a minor update, rather than simply downloading a patch. This is a *major* problem for me as downloads take an age, and yum keeps wanting to yum more and more
- copy and paste doesn't always work, e.g. if i copy something in firefox then close firefox and paste in some other app there's nothing in the clipboard
So, in general, on my laptop, Windows was a better choice and there's no way I'd recommend Linux to my gran yet. In fact, I bought my girlfriend an iBook this month, and she loves it. And I also love the way you just close the lid and boom, its asleep. open, and its away. none of that yet with my linux.
I downloaded the newly released Ubuntu 5.04 this morning. Installation took about 30 minutes, and here's what I have:
Boots off CD and installs like it should? Check.
Detects all hardware devices during the installation, even the wireless card? Check.
Sound works? Check.
Video works? Check minus (see below).
Power management works, meaning sleep and suspend to disk (hibernate) work flawlessly and CPU speed throttles correctly? Check.
Modem works? Who cares!
Bluetooth works? Probably, but I don't have any BT devices to check it with.
IBM's Active Protection System works to protect the hard drive? Nope.
All function buttons for sleep, suspend, brightness, volume, etc. work? Yup.
So, I'm sitting here with a notebook that by current standards is running pretty darn good under Ubuntu, with a very small amount of manual configuration necessary to get this far. What's holding Linux back from running as nicely as Windows on the ThinkPad?
The video is the biggest problem. Ubuntu installs DRI drivers by default, which work pretty well, but lack 3D acceleration support. I can install the ATI binary drivers with a few simple commands, but they break suspend/resume functionality, which is arguably more important for most notebook users. I also won't be able to use the nifty ThinkVantage features on my expensive ThinkPad, like the Active Protection system.
So notebook users have a dilemma: do the Right Thing and handicap your system by installing Linux, or stick with the factory installation of Windows where everything Just Works. The never-ending battle of Morality vs. Functionality rages on.
(For those with the same/similar ThinkPad, see my quickly written guide for more detail.)
"rather have a fully functional, if closed, Nvidia driver than a reverse-engineered one that limps along."
;)
Like BitDefender
I've tried several different Linux distributions on my laptop over the last four years. (Yes, it's been the same laptop, a Presario 1800-series, for that entire time.) Some have worked right out of the box, others haven't worked at all, most are somewhere in between.
One trend I've noticed is that Red Hat / Fedora keeps getting progressively worse. RH7.x worked great. It detected all of the hardware right out of the box -- including the video chipset, at a time when even Windows 2000 didn't have a video driver. RH8 and 9 still worked, but not as well. FC1 found some things not working anymore, FC2 was worse, and with FC3 I had the same experience as the author of TFA: a black screen, with no way to install at all. Should there happen to be an FC4, I doubt I'll even bother trying it.
The best current distro I've found for my laptop is Mepis, with Suse as a close second place, and FreeBSD 5.3 doing admirably as well. I suppose it's worth noting, though, that on my Dell laptop at work, no Linux distro I've tried works at all, but FreeBSD has been great from day 1. Conclusion: your mileage is unconditionally guaranteed to vary based on what laptop you use.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The only Linux that I've seen that comes close in the power management area is SuSE 9.2 (haven't tried 9.3 yet), but even there the suspend to disk is unreliable.
No single ideology can encompass all possible situations; open source can - and must, in many cases - co-exist peacefully next to closed source and commercial software.
Still, you can only go thus far in cooperation with proprietary vendors and remain open source. Once you bend down for NDA, fees (who's gonna pay them anyway?), or changing your license you pretty much compromised the practical value of your product to the users, limited your design choices and eroded the motivation to work for your fellow developers.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Maybe instead of this continual battle with Linux and drivers (which I don't see getting better anytime soon) somebody should engage in a mass-reverse-enginnering of the Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). Add your *nix hooks on top of that, and then if it works with windows it ought to work under Linux. I know the devil is in the details, and this would not be an easy project, but has anyone thought of that?
...is working flawlessly. So?
I'm afraid you're mistaken in this in the following way:-
If there were a standard ABI for drivers within a major release of Linux you could essentially disociate the drivers from the kernel. The driver development could then run on a totally different timescale to the core kernel with release dates as they wish.
It would also mean that the driver maintainers could release a binary version of their driver, which they have tested themselves (as well as releasing the source code for those who wish to look at the nitty gritty) so that the users can just install and go.
It would help the driver developers with support no end if one binary fits all kernel sub-versions and configurations.
On the point of closed-source/commercial drivers. They would only need to produce one version for everyone (rather than having to compile 15 different ones for each distribution and kernel release for each of those). This would make them FAR more likely to throw support at the problem as the money/time (same thing) they'd have to devote to the wasteful compile and package part of the business would be a whole lot less.
The problem is that some people in the free software business place idiology and self-interest over practicality (from the user viewpoint). The idiology being "if we make an ABI then the evil propriatory people will use it" and the self-interest being "if we don't specify an ABI then we can change out API on a whim." The second of those is probably the more important to the Linux developers as they seem to change the driver API within major releases quite a bit. (A number of drivers which compile on older 2.6 kernels won't anymore because the API has changed radically within the last few sub-releases.)
For the uptake and maintainability of Linux, this driver nightmare is the biggest drawback and it's nothing really to do with closed source at all.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Why can't I play a DVD in fullscreen mode?
.... hold on to your ass ... FULL SCREEN DVD PLAYBACK!!!!!!
You can. The DVDPlayer app has this wonderful functionality called "Enter Full Screen" that does... ready for this... FULL SCREEN DVD PLAYBACK!!!!!
Of course if Apple's DVD player isn't your cup of tea, there's VLC, which has a Full Screen mode which does
Why is there no API that lets me as a programmer put an application into fullscreen mode?
There is, we've had this discussion before. Please research VLC, iCab, VirtualPC, ANY ambrosia software game or for that matter any number of games on the mac.
Frankly, it's all show and no go. If that's what you want out of your computer, go ahead. Not being able to actually watch a movie, or play a game fullscreen on my $1000 widescreen display is enough reason for me to not waste my time with it.
So I guess playing my DVDs in full screen mode, playing my video clips in full screen mode, playing Worms3D in full screen mode, running VirtualPC in full screen mode and playing Unreal Tournament in full screen mode were all figments of my imagination right? I mean it has to be cause you said it can't be done.
Frankly, I'd rather spend my money on a PC that does what I want, even if it doesn't have shiny airbrushed icons.
agreed, so I bought a powerbook.
I'd also rather spend 350 on a PSP, or even an iRiver jukebox that plays movies, games, and mp3s, than that piece of junk iPod which can't even reproduce sound faithfully (look at some critical reviews of it's performance wrt bass).
which has nothing to do with OS X or powerbooks and has everything to do with your belief that the sound output of a portable music device playing lossy MP3s matters on the $20 headphones that you bought.
Remind me again who the troll is?
How well does linux support APM features on laptops in general, especially hibernation mode? Hibernation is a majro feature that I rather like as it lets you pause the state of the computer while consuming no power at all. AT LEAST it should support stand by, but that's really not sufficient.
It's really just a matter of time before some malware gets shipped with binary-only drivers. It could be piggy-backed on legit drivers, or it could even be required operation of the driver itself.
Imagine a graphics adapter driver, that catches all DRMed stuff, and phones home to the MPAA that YOUR machine is displaying film XYZ for the 5th time (so it HAS to be illegal, right!?). Or a wireless card driver that opens a back door to DHS and other agencies?
You may be willing to sacrifice security for convenience, but personally, I'd prefer to have the source code right there, so I (and many others) can check the integrity of the driver.
Oh yeah: in many security-aware companies, binary-only drivers is an absolute no-no. They are going open source exactly because their operations are security-sensitive, and if they now kept adding untrusted binary black boxes to their systems, even their firewalls wouldn't protect them long enough against all kind of espionage or even sabotage.
Just say no to binary-only drivers! You never really know what you get! If manufacturers don't want to disclose their source code, they may have something to hide as well. How trustworthy are they really then?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
FBSD 5.3 works fine on my laptop.
Winmodem, video, sound pccard slot. wifi..
While it may not be your beloved linux, its more then 'laptop ready'.
Sure i had to install a couple of packages for the modem, but its not like its hard.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There is no way that the major vendors are going to devote enough resources to be able to keep up with linux kernel development until people start boycotting their proprietary, closed, non-working hardware.
Buy a freaking laptop that is known to be supported with GNU/Linux by researching what's out there. Otherwise you'll keep getting disappointed and hardware manufacturers are not going to change their ways.
The problem lies in the hands of people like Turner. People like you and me.
Windows XP works on my laptop out of the box. With Linux, i have to spend hours tweaking the cpu throttling stuff, editing the modules.conf, spending hours finding the obscure modeline that works on my wide screen display, spend more time compiling ndiswrapper, spend more time configuring xsupplicant to work on our corporation's 802.1x wireless auth system (which works instantly in Windows), among other things.
A proper Linux install on my laptop takes anywhere from a few hours to several days (counting the time to install it, counting the time to compile a kernel that has the correct drivers I need, and the time it takes to configure all these userspae programs, etc).
Linux is great on the server and I will always use it there, but it has a LONG LONG way to go to become a mainstreak OS on the laptop or desktop.
I've been running gentoo on a centrino laptop wonderfully. My only problem is roaming wireless support, It SUCKS. Whenever I change wireless networks, i Have to completely restart the network, and then select the network. Does anyone know a way around this, or some script or program..
He finally does get around to installing Suse 9.1, and has success with that but a) he should have started with Suse instead of Slackware and b) he should be using the latest version, which is 9.3, not 9.1. Hardware support is improving rapidly, so 9.3 is a big step from 9.1 in terms of what it can detect.
As good a the linux community may be with developing compelling and useful programs, Nvidia and ATI have done a stellar job of producing excelent drivers, especially for Windows (which realistically is 99% of their audience). That being said, I find it hard to believe the performance boosts and optimizations that come out of those in-house driver developers could be matched by the Linux community. Nvidia and ATI spend a lot of money and have some of the most talented driver developers in the world, who know the hardware they are working with inside out. You need to know the hardware that well before you can produce a driver that is both blazing fast and stable, and anybody who thinks that Nvidia or ATI is going to open up their hardware that much is off his or her rocker. Closed source may be a sore-spot, but I think in this case, it is a situation where Linux users will have to suck it up and realize that for now, there's no alternative.
I just booted up the Ubuntu 5.0.4 live-cd on my laptop and it works very nicely! It autodetected everything including my iPod. This is coming from someone who more or less stopped using Linux three years ago for OS X (I had been using Linux since '96). Anyway, things are definitely looking good from here. I'll post a more in-depth review in my blog soon.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Freeze the god damn driver APIs. At least give hardware vendors a chance to provide you with the drivers that are easy to install and use. Otherwise the state of Linux on the laptop will remain what it is today: five years behind Windows.
Since buying my laptop last year, I've tried out 4 different Linux distros on it for various reasons. Here are the results of each one, from worst to best.
1. Mandrake 10.0 Download Edition
Useless, as the installer just plain died. I've used Mandrake before with my desktop, where it did fine, but I could never get the installer to actually work on my laptop. Apparently, it didn't like something about my hardware configuration.
2. GamesKnoppix 3.7-0.2, LiveCD
Booting from the CD went fine, although to be fair the installer did hang the first time I tried it. Hardware detection went well except for two issues. First, it didn't detect my wireless card AT ALL. Don't ask me why, I have no idea. As my only means of connecting to the Internet back here in my office, that means I couldn't get online at all. No real biggie, since I was only really using it to test out the games on it.
Second, my mouse. I have two pointer devices on my laptop, a Logitech USB MX-Laser Mouse and a Synaptics Touchpad. The installer seemed to get the touchpad working correctly, but I couldn't use the mouse at all. Again, it's only minor, but inconvenient nonetheless. My impression is that had I actually decided to install Knoppix on my hard drive, it would have taken some work but I could have made the system fully functional.
3. SuSE Linux 9.2 Professional
After ditching Mandrake, I headed for SuSE. Installation was slightly better than GamesKnoppix. Same initial issue with the mice, but it correctly detected and installed drivers for my wireless card. It was easier to configure my wireless network with SuSE that it was with Mandrake 9.2 (which I used earlier on my desktop), but it ended up being a tug-of-war between YaST and KWifiManager. In the end, I had to scrap KWifiManager to get wireless to work at all.
The mouse was also hit or miss. Initially, it seemed to be using the same driver for both. This didn't really work, because I couldn't use the advanced features of the touchpad. I tried using the SuSE forums on the Novell website, but I never really got the problem fixed. It would fix for one boot, then it would revert back to using whatever drivers it had before. Sometimes I would boot and could only use the touchpad, sometimes the mouse would work as well. Sometimes the advanced features of the touchpad would be functional, sometimes not.
SuSE came with a "profile switcher" feature that I liked because I could use a different profile for my home network and the one at work. I was excited about this because I connect to the Internet differently at each. At home, it's exclusively wireless. This means I need to bring up ath0 on boot, but not eth0 (I found that if eth0 is active, even if not plugged in, SuSE will default to using it for the Internet and ignore ath0). Then, at work, it's exactly reversed. In practice, it wasn't as effective as it's advertised. I frequently required a reboot to bring up new services and get things configured correctly, and even then it didn't always work. Nice thought, bad execution.
I finally had to ditch SuSE when I ran into RPM Hell. I'm getting pretty fed up with this, because I experienced it with Mandrake on my desktop as well. I recall that once (when using Mandrake), I tried to install some Connect 4-esque game. In attempting to resolve dependencies, I ended up downloading about 50 Mandrake-specific RPM's of different packages, none of which would install. In the end, I had two RPM's that claimed they were dependencies of each other, but it wouldn't recognize that I had them both and so they never installed. I think I wasted about 5 hours that day. SuSE was a little better, but it still suffers from RPM Hell. So, I finally ditched it in favor of...
4. SimplyMEPIS 3.3, LiveCD -> HD Install
I wanted to use Debian to get away from the RPM crap, but I knew perfectly well I'd never make it through that horrible installer. Someone suggested using SimplyMEPIS instead, since it's basically just Debian
Tuck
Tuck's Journal.
On my laptop, including my usb wifi. (with 2.6) This sounds kinda like a freind of mine, who is always railing against the evils of microsoft, and when he buys a new computer, he gets the all-in-wonder card. Now, he knows this is unsuported in linux, I tell him not to get it, he gets it, it doesn't work in linux, and he bitchs about how crappy linux's driver support is. If these people are valuable assets to the OSS comunity then we have lost something, but my freind is not a programmer, and some how I doubt this guy is either. So, I haven't lost anything, at any rate.
"The problem is that some people in the free software business place idiology and self-interest over practicality"
Well, DUH. It bugs me no end when people say about free software advocates place idiology over practicality. What do you expect?
Plus, purely practically, you have to look at the long term view.
In the short term, perhaps we will get more drivers, but in the long term it's far better for us all to force manufacturers to open their specs. They won't have any motivation to do that if we make it easy for them to make binary only drivers.
If you have a Thinkpad, I highly recommend installing Ubuntu. It's a great distro!
When the ATI and nVidia say, we can't be bothered with writing Linux drivers anymore, but we still won't open the source, what are you going to do?
I'll only buy harware that has good drivers, that's what. And, as it happens, ATI falls into that category. The video drivers for ATI in XFree/Xorg are pretty darn good. I can play my tuxracer, bzflag, torcs, and a number of other great 3D games just fine. Thanks, X dudes!
I tried installing ATI's binary-only driver, and I couldn't get the stupid thing to work. What a waste of time that was. I hate having to install drivers. I love drivers that come complete w/ my OS!
The state of linux on laptops is chunks better than it was when I started this odyssey. There are a lot less vendors and the hardware is waaay more advanced. Am I doing myself a favor begging for drivers from nvidia and ati? Am I doing myself a favor by buying a pawn shop special or eBay box. Linux is only free if you de-value your time.
OTOH, the PPC hw is fast reliable and has all the HW interfaces. A reasonably equipped G4 and 512+ MB RAM is what 1100 - 1500 and the G3 500 that I use (and *more* than meets my needs) and all other G3s on eBay are all less than $600. If the same HW runs the same OS and the same apps, then does it really matter what the CPU is?
My laptop is 5+ years old and when I open the lid and wake it up I am typing in something less than three seconds I have been M$ free and compatible for more than five years. When Cortez got to the New World he Burned his boats. If you have no way to get back to Microsoft then you propabaly will not go back.
--Shaddup and support your local PBS station Plan for it
I had the same experience that the author did except my laptop is an old Thinkpad P3 500 with lots of RAM.
Fedora: Installer exited with error before it was done.
Suse 9.1: Installed and ran great, but there are/were issues with usb-hotplug and I couldn't compile anything from source either. (terminal exit with error 1?) My lack of patience put that distro to an end.
Debian Sarge: The best by far. I had to do the kernel recompile to get the wireless card to collect stats, but otherwise there have been no surprises. As much as I hear compliants about a lack of a Sarge release, it works much better right now than Suse 9.1 (with updates) without the Suse polish.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
no text to fullfill the cutyour tongue filter. There is no usefull text here.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Last weekend I got a new laptop. The first thing I did was repartition and format the drive. Right now I'm dual booting Windows XP and Linux.
I tried installing several distros and settled on Ubuntu because almost everything worked right out of the box (cd?). The SDIO slot doesn't work, but that's of minor concern to me. The big hole in functionality right now is the video driver. I have an ATI X300 Mobile gpu, and I can't get the binary driver to work. So no hardware 3D for me for now.
And while we're holding Linux to the same standard as Windows: With just the install CD for Ubuntu (this was 5.04 RC), I was able to get video (without acceleration), network (wired and wireless), modem, and audio working. I had an install I could use for web browsing, word processing, email, playing music, CD burning, and all of the basics most people spend 95% of their computer time on. I'm a Linux n00b, so I'm still exploring what's on this thing. Yesterday I found the option to configure PalmOS devices, so I'm going to play with that today.
Windows XP gave me none of the above except email and web. I had to go to Dell's web site to download drivers for all of the above devices. Yeah, I guess wordpad technically counts as word processor, but it's no OpenOffice. The Ubuntu install was much easier than the XP install on the same machine.
The dual boot setup was simple. Mounting the NTFS partition wasn't intuitive, but there are step by step instructions on the Ubuntu site. That was a nifty intro to the mounting system.
WiFi setup was a breeze, and it Just Worked. It loaded drivers for the modem, but I haven't tested it (haven't used a modem in years). It booted up using my screen's native resolution without me having to tell it (XP, Mandrake, and CentOS all failed in this regard). Accessing the Windows network also Just Worked, and half the time I can't even get my initial Windows installs to do that.
So far so good.
SimplyMEPIS-3.3 installed onto my new Gateway M675XL laptop perfectly. It even automatically connected the internal broadcom 11g wireless chip and gave me 54MGz of browsing pleasure!
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I use Debian unstable on Thinkpad T41.
i nkpad-t41/http://chriscarey.us/hardware/myhardware /thinkpad-t41/>
Used to dual boot XP/Debian but no more. Now its full-time Linux. Basically all hardware works. Only minor issues exist.
I wouldnt use any other distro. Debian in the best. Redhat/Fedora pissed me off because with every new release you had to re-install.
ahref=http://chriscarey.us/hardware/myhardware/th
...is with a Macintosh.
As long as we're on the subject, I've got a Dell Inspiron 8600 (which is quite similar to the D600 in most respects) with the Radeon option with WUXGA display and all that good stuff.
I've got everything working except suspend... I'd really really like suspend to work. If I had gone with nVidia, I'd probably be fine as I've read numerous accounts of people getting it to work. (And here I was thinking ATI was better supported under Linux... psh! Shows what I know.)
Does anyone have any links to places that I might seek a solution?
I would like to know this works as well!
--LWM
From EmperorLinux.
They installed Debian on mine. It even came with a well done printed manual to explain how to use the features specific to that laptop.
Definitely ordering from them again.
We were badly burned in a scenario where a Dell d800 laptop (with NVIDIA card) wont work properly
;-)
(if at all) with external projectors!
The solution? either get a DVI capable projector and
cart along a Dell port replicator.. *OR* use
a Dell d600 or c640 etc: (one of their machines with an ATI video card)
Lame, the d800 was a nice machine, cant use it
for the purpose intended (demo software on linux) but you can watch some killer DVD's with it
stop smoking crack. the intel 2200 and 2915 centrino wireless chipsets have excellent 100% open source linux drivers provided by intel here.
>What's needed to make things better? Well, the Linux community needs to address the device driver crisis.
No, stupid, the hardware manufacturers need to address the device driver crisis. You think the working-but-closed nVidia driver exists because of something the "Linux community" did? It was a decision made by nVidia to provide Linux drivers.
Unless you expect a bunch of penguin-suited ninjas to infiltrate D-Link and Intel headquarters and start stealing hardware specs for our wireless cards.
I installed FC3 on my brand-new Thinkpad in November, and everything just worked. Only bug I had to report was a situation that had nothing to do with my laptop (HAL sometimes doesn't want to let go of a CD/DVD). A little while back I tried the Ubuntu liveCD, and everything just worked; this weekend I'll be installing Hoary.
But it's not a 'who's right' issue, really; in my experience, the big factor with Linux on laptops is the quality of the laptop. Get a bargain-basement machine and you're likely to run into problems because the hardware will be things like ultra-cheap Winmodems. Spend the money on a quality laptop, and things work much better.
ok so you want a dilemma.. i bought a Toshiba 425CDS on ebay the other for $30.. Its sweet as hell and even came with a working battery..
of course its only a p100 with 16 megs of ram, but I still want to put linux on it.. there is a cdrom on it, but it is NOT bootable.. so did the old fashion thing, and made some bootdisk images.. its being a freakin bitch.. i've tried a few different distros, and none can even detect my odd cdrom, so there's no "media source" for it to install from..
i have yet to try SuSE though.. i just want a nice console-only linux box, with support for my PCMCIA Kingston NIC... if anyone has any recommendations, i'd appreciate it..
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
I installed Ubuntu Hoary on my laptop (an old-ish Dell) a couple of days ago, and hibernate works great out of the box. It uses some kind of software suspend, which (I would geuss) means it's likely to work on a lot of different hardware.
That's why I bought a Thinkpad; I know there's no weird fly-by-night hardware in here, and absolutely everything worked (the standard Orinoco module supported my wireless card out of the box). There's even a kernel module available which implements IBM's advanced power-management settings and other niceties.
Just buy an Apple PowerBook or iBook and freaking be done with it! Run OS X if you care more about stuff just 'WORKING'. You can run all of your Open Source software under OS X! Plus you can run all the Apple Software including MS Office! Install the developer tools, install X11 and then go install Fink. You can ssh into your Linux / BSD / Solaris / AIX boxen, run X11 apps remotely, etc. Every *nix user and sysadmin I run into drools over my PowerBook, it's getting to the point where I have to carry a towel with me!
Or if you are a GNU/Open Source Purist, put Linux on the iBook / PowerBook. They are the most supported laptops available for Linux. Most everything works as it should even under Linux! Even Linux Torvalds is running a PowerMac G5 workstation (it was a gift and it blows away most x86 hardware), albeit running Linux and not OS X.
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/ 4.0.1 now supports sleep mode on the Apple laptops w/ATI video cards. Not everything works even on Apple hardware.
Seriously, if you want a *NIX laptop, get an iBook or a Powerbook where everything just works. On the positive side, I've been using an IBM T41 laptop wise SuSE 9.1 Pro exclusively for a year and a half now for work (I do Windows/Linux SA stuff), and I have had very, very few issues. As always, though, workarounds have to be made for certain in-house 'business critical apps' that will only work in WINE or IE... Linux on a laptop is great. But not as great as OSX on my iBook...
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
From the article:
Giving up long-term goals for short-term gains is the hallmark of people who don't understand the struggle or the consequences (or are using popular hardware and don't care to think about how software freedom scales up). This is probably why the author frames the issue in the language of the open source movement -- "closed" software -- the movement which doesn't insist upon your ability to freely share and modify software.
Software freedom is valuable in itself, and proprietary software is rarely a means toward achieving that end. Accepting a proprietary program is a risky proposition because it can mean that people will become satisfied with the proprietary software and thus become less likely to write a free replacement. But even for those who dismiss the freedom to share and modify software, they should appreciate the ability to run the driver on different platforms anywhere, anytime, and maintain those programs as we go. It's not good to have to wait for some proprietor to cater to your computer's architecture, whether this means waiting for nVidia to update its i386 drivers for the latest Linux kernel revision, or hoping that some proprietor will distribute a driver for your wireless hardware in your non-i386-based computer.
We should value software which we can freely share and modify so that we aren't dependent on proprietors and they can't dictate to us what computers we use, how they run, and what interesting things we are allowed to do with them. It takes a little more effort to find hardware that works with free software, it can mean denying oneself some glitzy features, but it is worth insisting on freedom. The free software community has come a long way in the past two decades. As FSF legal counsel says, let's not give up the struggle because "we're a little closer to the front of the bus".
Digital Citizen
How nice it would be if I got a Knoppix from Dell or IBM with all the drivers (binary is fine) preinstalled along with my laptop. Load the Window$ crap by default paying the M$ tax but I can atleast switch to Linux without having to hunt for drivers !!
Besides I would have a default recovery disk.
Imagine how their support costs would plument when the user connects to the internet without a firewall !! Insert that Knoppix disk that came with you package and delete the following file '/mnt/.../Gator/*'.
Specfically, why I see so many Powerbooks there every year.
You can buy fully functional laptops with Gentoo installed from http://www.rayservers.com/
As far as Linus Torvalds is concerned, it's okay to become dependent upon a proprietary revision system (BitKeeper), take credit for more work than he did (allowing interviewers to talk to him about the "Linux operating system" without correction that he is merely the initial author of a kernel), and generally position popularity as a higher priority than freedom. When it comes to the inner workings of the Linux kernel, you should certainly turn to him. But I strongly doubt that the free software community would have gotten as far as it has in the past 20 years if Torvalds' philosophy of pragmatism had been set out instead of RMS' philosophy of pursuing software freedom. The FSF has a great entry in their GNU/Linux FAQ" on this issue.
As for the value of these secrets, they're overrated and irrelevant. I'll have to leave it to others to find a somewhat recent post on Slashdot allegedly from someone who works at a video card manufacturer who said that the value of these secrets is highly overrated. There's also the conflict between what Linus Torvalds initially wrote and the value of these alleged secrets--if the secrets are so valuable, we dare not run any software which we can all inspect, share, and modify. It's also ahistorical--hardware manufacturers didn't always behave this way.
But what's really disturbing about the argument for helping proprietors preserve secrets is that it takes the side of those who would divide us and keep us helpless rather than help us acheive freedom while simultaneously making an honorable buck. Frankly, it's worth it to give up that innovation in exchange for more freedom. Innovation will come regardless, don't give up your freedom in the belief that we can't have freedom if someone claims that they won't innovate anymore. If they leave, there are plenty of other innovative people to replace them. The most innovative stuff, the reasons people buy and use computers came in freedom (e-mail and the web). It's our struggle to keep it free that really matters.
Digital Citizen
Using MacOS X on a laptop works just as well as on a desktop. Perfect, beautiful user interface. It's really great. Pull up "Terminal" and you're on a semi-BSD command-line. Try it sometime. You may like it.
Problems with Linux on x86 laptops. That's not surprising. How about someone makes a Dell 2004+ distribution? Support the few devices Dell has released since Jan 01, 2004. I'm sure that would be a do-able task. The problem is that there is just too much hardware to support. Too many Mainboard, NIC's, Firewire cards, USB cards, etc. Create a distro that works great on a few specific vendors and the tasks become easier. Those who don't have the supported hardware? Build your own I guess. Next time buy something that has a real name on it. The reason MacOS X works great on laptops is because Apple writes the OS and creates the hardware. How many pieces of hardware does it have to support? Not all that many. Anyhow, start making distro's that use specific vendors hardware, within the past few years. Forget all the old stuff. If someone wants to use it they'll have to buy into the correct product lines.
Hardware manufacturers need to be challenged to negotiate better contracts or put money into writing the software and building the hardware themselves so that they can sell hardware which we can support ourselves.
As for "gain[ing] the best market share": first, it's not my concern to think of their market share. But it is worth noting that this is not the either-or case the proprietors argue. The manufacturers most people think of when this discussion comes around largely haven't tried any other way but secrecy, so they have no idea how much "market share" awaits them by helping people preserve their freedom in a legally defensible way (such as releasing GPL-covered source code for drivers and firmware). If they were to advertise on this basis, software freedom could be more of a market value and help them pursue a largely underserved market. Many of these proprietors are already paying programmers to update their proprietary software anyhow, they could tell the community to do this themselves. I'm sure the hackers at X.org and OpenBSD would appreciate this effort.
You misrepresent what the free software community is asking for and has defended with 20 years of hard work and cooperation amongst ourselves (and with business) by glibly dismissing our concerns with "Bla Bla" and saying that we call corporations "Evil". Such language also dismisses genuine harm brought on corporations as though it's not worth considering. Users don't have to trade away all of our freedom in exchange for some meager technical improvement. We can value our freedom, teach others to value their freedom, and in so doing, create change amongst these corporations.
Free software has already demonstrated their power to make change: the most powerful software corporation continues to make tours of college campuses denouncing our effort by calling us "unamerican" and a "cancer" to "intellectual property", maintain a large slush fund so they can offer zero cost copies of proprietary software to would-be large-seat licensees, hire disreputable research firms to lie about GNU/Linux, and conflate what began with the GNU project as "open source" because they know they can't compete with software freedom (which the open source movement doesn't talk about) so they pick the movement which pitches a different message aimed at being friendly to businesses. Other organizations demonize and try to marginalize the free software community in other ways. I see that behavior and I see that we have political power when we work together toward freedom.
Digital Citizen
Heh...I could have told him what he did wrong...I had the exact same issue when I tried to install Fedora on my Toshiba. It took me a lot of flopping around (two reinstalls) to identify and fix the issue, but now Fedora works like a charm.
I have it too
Then go use Windows, damnit.
Linux is stable because of the paucity of binary device drivers. Binary drivers are hard to debug, they have undocumented behaviour, they tie the user into a specific platform and version of the kernel, they make it harder for the kernel developers to fix architectural flaws with Linux without breaking all the drivers, and the Linux distributions are often denied the right to bundle the binary drivers.
Short-sighted users love to point to the nvidia driver and say "see, that one is better than the free driver, why don't we have more of those". The problem is that the nvidia driver is an anomaly. Most binary drivers are crap, on any platform. The most recent experience I had was with a Dlink wireless driver on Windows. It was atrocious! It had different drivers for Windows 98 vs Windows 2000. Neither of them was stable; installing the drivers resulted in crashes on either platform. Both drivers were difficult to configure and had lousy interfaces. In my experience, that is the NORM for binary drivers.
Why would we want that hellish situation on Linux? Linus has taken the correct attitude; make it possible to develop binary device drivers, but don't make it easy. The Linux developers won't bother to debug a kernel linked with binary drivers, they refuse to freeze the ABI, and they make architectural changes whenever it benefits the kernel even if those changes break the binary device drivers.
The kernel developers know that binary drivers will HARM the long-term success of Linux. Listen to them; they know more about this than you do.
If ATI/NVidia do not publically state precisely which "IP" agreements are stopping them from open-sourcing their drivers then what you are saying is just marketing FUD.
I'm guessing that exactly which parts of the driver belong to other companies is a valuable trade secret covered under the same non-disclosure agreement that prohibits disclosing the source code of the licensed parts.
Because they are running Unixy apps. The apps drive the choice of OS
The real problem comes with the state of wireless support. People claim that well obviously things won't work right with cheap wireless cards like those built into most laptops, but thats a load. Look at regular ethernet cards. I tend to buy loads of realtek 83159 cards because they're cheap and work fine under Linux. Why can't the same be done with wireless.
The problem with Free drivers for radio communication devices is that national radio regulatory authorities frown on making devices that can be easily modified to exceed permissible levels of output power or to run on unapproved frequencies.
But Linux and BSD were developed despite USLs opposition to releasing source code.
GNU/Linux and *BSD are implementations of the POSIX API, which was published. The equivalent in video-driver-land of the POSIX API would be register-level descriptions of the hardware, which unlike the POSIX API are not public.
So, I think one great thing is availability of pre-loaded Linux laptops (e.g. from LinuxCertified http://linuxcertified.com/). I have had even problems with Windows and drivers for laptop components. So, we are almost getting equal (in good and bad).
I'm sorry to burst your utopian bubble, but this will never ever happen.
Linux is too small a market for them to worry about and it will forever be so when Aunt May can't just plug in and go. The companies who prefer closed source will just ignore the small loss of ernings from the Linux crowd.
As for the reason for not designing a properly thought out, documented, standardised and unchanging (during the life of a major sub-version) driver interface just in case a commercial, closed source company may write a driver for it: Isn't this throwing the baby out with the bath water?
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Is it an 802.11g card?
+++ATH0
It took me two months to decide what laptop to buy? I researched and researched what was Linux-compat via linux-laptops and what laptop had what I desired. It is not linux or FOSS problem, it is the manf. Do your research before you buy...if you buy a laptop for $1, will that is what you get...a laptop is an investment...treat it as such.
Deserving got nothing to do with it.....shuffle