Advice for Linux on a Laptop?

Trillian_1138 is seeking your advice on the following: "So I'm looking at replacing my aging laptop. I have a desktop running Ubuntu, which I use as a primary, and it is more than adequate for my needs. However, I'd love a small, portable laptop to use in class and on trips. I've been looking at the MacBook Pros and, more recently, the MacBooks, and was almost ready to buy the low-end MacBook and be done with it. I liked its ability to dual-book to Windows for a couple of school-related programs, but the more I thought about it the more I like using Ubuntu at home and the less reason I saw to buy a Mac if I could use Ubuntu on a laptop. This brought me to the idea of buying a laptop to use as a dual-boot Linux/Window machine, either with Linux or Windows pre-installed, and setting up a dual-boot with the other OS. Might any of you have advice, anecdotes, success stories, horror stories, or general input?" "Please note I am not looking for a discussion on whether Linux is 'Ready for the Desktop'. I switched over to Ubuntu earlier this year and haven't looked back. As far as I'm concerned, Linux is ready for *my* desktop, which is all I really care about. This laptop is for me, not my mom. I'm not a command-line guru by any means and likes having a nice GUI, but am comfortable Googling when my DVDs stop playing after an update or poking around in configuration files to get things working. What I'm now curious about is what to expect - positive and negative - with Linux on a laptop.

I know a quick Google search yields lots of information on laptops running Linux, and I am continuing to use Google to look at information on running Linux on laptops which came with Windows, buying OS-less laptops, and buying laptops with Linux pre-installed, but I'm curious what the Slashdot crowd thinks. Is it even worth the bother? Would I be better off buying a Dell and installing Linux or buying a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed from somewhere like system76.com or Linuxcertified.com?"

Comments

Linux on a laptop

[pfelelep]

Be especially careful about whether your laptop's power management (battery management, auto powering down of components like disks, display, NICs etc.) is supported by your distro. You don't want to manually go to sleep or shutdown every 10 minutes or so in order to save battery power...

If you ask me, I would already have bought the MacBook, the black one just look gorgeous !

OS X is simply the best unix desktop OS around : it has the best plug and play experience around in terms of quality, it runs Office, Photoshop and Apache, and its excellent user-oriented optimizations makes everything feel snappy, especially with many apps open, an area where Windows definitively sucks, even on superior hardware.

Imagine that at last you can run it on the same kickass CPU's than PC's. Hell, you can even run Windows AND Linux natively ! For the same budget, I really don't see how one wouldn't want to run such a cutting-edge OS (and any other popular one) on such a beautiful laptop.

FYI I have been mac-only for years (I am a happy PC owner since 1 year but my main box is a G4).
Sorry for the enthusiastic biased style, but when it comes to Mac vs. Linux I just can't control myself ;)

Re:Atheros & other wireless chipsets

[ryanov]

My card is the Cisco a/b/g card. I think it's AR5212? Something like that.

I get constant ath0 hardware error; resetting. I don't know what that's affecting, but I had FAR less trouble with my old Orinoco card.