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."

Comments

Happy with my laptop, but...

[ALecs]

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.

Re:Happy with my laptop, but...

[mjg59]

Linux ignores the BIOS and uses it's own calls to talk to the hardware. For ACPI? No. For APM? Really, really no. ACPI sleep works well on about 75% of laptop hardware, though you have to go through some contortions to get the video back. Another 10% or so reboot immediately on resume for reasons that aren't understood yet. The others have a variety of issues, mostly on resuming IDE. Most hardware ought to work reasonably well in 6 months or so. We're already way beyond where we were 6 months ago.

Linspire..

[sammykrupa]

Has full laptop support.

Knoppix as Shoppix

[kale77in]

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).

Re:Obviously not ready for the laptop

[philipgar]

I agree, although with stipulations. Linux is not ready for laptops. I have an ibook for that very reason. However Linux is mostly ready for desktop replacement style laptops. When battery life is not an issue (so the importance of APCI/APM support is minimal), many problems go away. 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. Besides every wireless card has different types of drivers, and even if you get your card to work, there are issues. Try using 802.1x authentication under Linux (which my school requires). I fighted with xsupplicant for over a month of my old thinkpad before giving up and deciding I need an ibook. Now that I have an ibook I have the best of both worlds. I have a unix friendly enviornment that easily interoperates with my linux workstations, and I still have working wireless, accelerated video, 5 hours of battery life, most linux apps run under it, MS Office runs on it (I know its the darkside, but its needed) and everything is plug and play compatible. Most of all things just work. I don't worry about anything. In this day and age when laptops are becoming permanantly network attached devices whats the need for a fancy hardware support. Let the laptop be a graphical terminal and everyone will be happy. Phil