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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. "
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 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.
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
To an extent, I agree with that statement. But I'd rather put it as "Until Linux becomes more popular". I don't see why manufacturers will even bother with a mass produced and heavily marketed laptop with Linux. Besides why would a common person go ahead and buy a laptop linux? They cost pretty much that same as a decent windows or even apple laptops.
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.
Finally! I was getting tired of every year since 1998 being the year of 'Linux on the desktop'
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
>> - 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.
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"
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
"The state of Linux on my Toshiba, 2005"
Come on, even for slashdot generalizing from a single datapoint is a little underwhelming.
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.
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
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.
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).
'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.
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
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?
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.
tags out-of-the-box.
adjust your X config file to use /dev/input/mice
It usually combines all mouse input to one stream.
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.)
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 work at Terra Soft (we make Yellow Dog). I can fill you in a bit:
I'm writing this right now on my 15" Powerbook.
Stuff that doesn't work:
-Airport Extreme* (it probably won't ever)
-3d Acceleration*
-There is no Flash for PPC linux(*)
-Newer model's touchpad changed, but it will eventually be supported, probably.
-Sound (on mine at least) is kind of ghetto. No mixing, only one app can play a sound at a time.
(*) = A binary driver from the manufacturer must be provided for this to work. Except flash. There is a GPL flash plugin, but it doesn't really work.
Also, don't get a 12" Powerbook. They are much different internally than the 15, and I don't think sleep is supported. You'll also want a pcmcia slot for Wifi, since airport doesn't work.
no comment
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.
but overall that really isnt going to turn me from windows to linux..
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
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
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.
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.