Entry tags:
Linux and off the shelf laptops
My seven yr old PC is behaving badly. It freezes in the middle of a loong yum operation, or even in the middle of switching between text apps.
I could try to get it repaired, but as I have dialup (through Airport), getting updates makes me cranky.
So I'm looking at off the shelf laptops, because I can't afford anything on a credit card.
What kind of laptops do you use, and with what distro? I've heard HP is awful, yet on a Fedora Planet entry, a developer said he'd just installed F15 on a new HP, with no problems. I've also noted others using Acer. Lenovo is out of my league, money-wise.
So, out of a mixture of curiosity and part of my on-going mission to get an idea of what is possible, what do you use in laptops? What distros are you using, and were there any gotchas at first?
Edited to add
I'm mostly curious about what kind of hardware people are using; Laptops DEFINITELY, but if you want to talk about your desktop rig and what you've put into it, go for it!
My computer is a Lenovo 3000 J Series. I have an old Nvidia card GEForce 6200, Old Sound Blaster Live! MP3 that still gives great sound - provided I get rid of Pulseaudio. No wireless, it connects via Ethernet to the Airport, which is controlled by an iMac. (not mine).
I could try to get it repaired, but as I have dialup (through Airport), getting updates makes me cranky.
So I'm looking at off the shelf laptops, because I can't afford anything on a credit card.
What kind of laptops do you use, and with what distro? I've heard HP is awful, yet on a Fedora Planet entry, a developer said he'd just installed F15 on a new HP, with no problems. I've also noted others using Acer. Lenovo is out of my league, money-wise.
So, out of a mixture of curiosity and part of my on-going mission to get an idea of what is possible, what do you use in laptops? What distros are you using, and were there any gotchas at first?
Edited to add
I'm mostly curious about what kind of hardware people are using; Laptops DEFINITELY, but if you want to talk about your desktop rig and what you've put into it, go for it!
My computer is a Lenovo 3000 J Series. I have an old Nvidia card GEForce 6200, Old Sound Blaster Live! MP3 that still gives great sound - provided I get rid of Pulseaudio. No wireless, it connects via Ethernet to the Airport, which is controlled by an iMac. (not mine).
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My suggestion is to figure out what you want and then google as much as you can to determine if other people have had trouble.
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I'm also just really curious about what other people are using for hardware. I could even add desktops/video cards, audio cards...wifi. I'm mostly curious.
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I've liked how nicely Ubuntu treats my nVidia graphics card for instance, it detected and automatically offered to install the proprietary driver should I want it, and graphics seems to be one of the major headaches if it doesn't work right.
I find Toshiba makes nice, but expensive laptops, but if I were you, I'd investigate Acer.
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I'm also dual-booting Ubuntu on my Dell desktop. Just to warn you in advance, Dell computers now ship with a proprietary program called DataSafe, which is supposed to keep your data safe in the event of, say, a catastrophic hard drive failure, but which also messes around with how the computer boots, in such a way that it cannot coexist on a dual boot system (unless you do a whole new install and put GRUB in a different directory).
SO, if you want to dual-boot, I think it's easiest if you uninstall DataSafe first.
(All this happened last year, and I'm kind of a n00b so I didn't even completely understand the technical part of it then, but I can dig up a link if you need.)
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Usual problems: AC97 audio and Wi-Fi. Both sort of work, however (well, AC97 seems to be meant to sort of work, right?) Can't say anything about suspend/resume as I never use it, but this might require some extra work as well.
No other problems encountered.
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Right now, my only issue is that the touchpad button jams sometimes. But it was a cheap laptop, so I expected problems like that.
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I'm no longer using it as a laptop but with an external monitor as a desktop since I got my Macbook Air earlier this year. That one is dual booting Kubuntu and working amazingly well so far - except for the battery life being crap when booted in Linux.
Wireless and audio work perfectly on both machines, the only thing I can't get to work on the Lenovo is Skype-Audio and -Video. But for that I've decided to blame the Skype software :)
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I know Lenovo would have/has a good compatibility record, because at some point, they were bundling Suse on some desktop/laptop models. I could look for a used model, I suppose.
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The laptop isn't too loud, and it doesn't heat up uncomfortably either. The one downside is that the speakers aren't stereo and not very loud either, though of course you can use earbuds.
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Of course, there's no guarantee that a modern Packard Bell would be that easy, the goalposts seem to keep moving all the time.
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Alack!
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If you're willing to look at used laptops and laptops that are a few years old, you can sometimes find really good deals.
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Check out http://tuxmobil.org/ and http://www.linux-laptop.net/ especially if you're getting something second-hand; those sites will tell you whether people have successfully installed Linux on given machines, and some of the problems they've had.
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Back in 2008 my Medion wireless network card wasn't supported, so I had to compile the driver, myself, which made me feel proudly nerdy - and kind of disappointed when it was supported from 9.04 on :oP
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I'll check out Medion, though I've never seen that brand here. I just read that Lenovo bought the company.
I know how you feel about feeling all nerdy. I had a lot of fun getting external CD burners to work, then, *poof* everything gets recognized.
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The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5739 with a GeForce 260M, Core 2 Duo, and 4 gigs of RAM running 10.10. The desktop is a custom build with an i7 920, GeForce 260 GTX OC, and 6 Gigs of RAM running 11.04 and Gnome3. I've always had better luck with Nvidia cards in Linux than ATI. As someone else mentioned, Ubuntu picks it up nicely and installs the drivers without issue.
In 10.04 and below, I did have a weird display issue on the laptop with the Nvidia drivers (yay for six versions of my desktop on a 15" laptop screen! *eyeroll*), but it was well-documented and just required a quick config file edit. That issue hasn't happened since 10.10 (and probably a card driver version or two later). That was the worst of it, though.
As a former tech support specialist, I personally avoid Dell like the plague. Not only did I see Dells far more than any other brand (and the place I worked for didn't even sell Dell computers at the time) and have dealt with them at both the consumer and business levels, but I also had irreconcilable issues with the Inspiron I had when trying to run Ubuntu on it, thanks to a graphics card that Ubuntu didn't recognize, and Intel swore didn't exist.