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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
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.
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.
Has full laptop support.
Dashboard Widgets
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
(She's good at email and the web, but she finds updating the virus scanner kind of confusing.. wish I could tell her she didn't need a virus scanner. If it was up to me, I'd install it for her.. but on the other hand, it took her so much effort to learn Windows I don't want to change things on her now.)
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
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).
I've helped a friend do this in the past. This posting more or less describes what to do:
a ry/039538.html
http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/2002-Febru
From what I recally, it worked quite well.
-- john
adjust your X config file to use /dev/input/mice
It usually combines all mouse input to one stream.
Which Microsoft realizes as well, I'm sure. I wonder if there is any pressure from Redmond - explicit or otherwise - on manufacturers not to release OSS drivers? Or maybe just extra candy for those that don't? Just speculating, but there's little doubt that they would do just that if they thought they could get away with it legally...
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?
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
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.
Why? AFAIK, none of the highly praised Apple laptops support hibernation/suspend-to-disk in the even more highly praised MacOS X.