Linux and off the shelf laptops

[baggyeyes]

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).

Comments

[pixel]

I've had very good experiences with HP printers and linux, but I don't know I'd ever spend the money on an HP computer. On the other hand, my go-to brand was ASUS but I've recently had really unfortunate problems with a brand new ASUS netbook and Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) I've had kernel panic problems that seem to be related to the wifi. Dell still seems like a reasonable choice these days.

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.

[baggyeyes]

I haven't sen many Asus in my area. Sony, HP, Toshiba and Acer are the brands I've been seeing.

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.

[pixel]

For desktops I tend to prefer to build myself, I didn't happen to build my current desktop, but it was a homebuilt rig. I've had very good luck with building, but there again it's a matter of 'how much can I afford?' with a dose of google to check for major problems.

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.

[baggyeyes]

I did that for my first desktop, before the Lenovo desktop. I probably could have done the same, but at the time, I really needed it for work, and didn't want to hand pick my components. I love to tinker. I think if I did replace it with a laptop, that tinkering part of me would be a sad panda.

[owlectomy]

I've been running Ubuntu on my HP netbook (a Mini 1030) for 2 years now with almost zero problems. (Almost? The hinge on the laptop broke, I sent it in for a repair with a note to pretty-please NOT reformat my hard drive, but they did just that. I find the build quality on HPs pretty abysmal.) I think I had a tiny problem getting wifi set up but that was pretty easily resolved.

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.)

[baggyeyes]

Thanks for the heads up about both models!

[doldonius]

I've got an Eee PCs 701 and an HP ProBook 4510s running Debian Lenny. Too bad they trashed KDE from Squeeze on. If you're a Gnome person, though, you might want to give it a shot anyway.

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.

[baggyeyes]

Suspend/Resume seems to be a common problem no matter the laptop/distro. A moving target, sometimes it works...or not.

[seekingferret]

I bought an HP G62 laptop in January and have been thrilled with its performance. Wireless works great, webcam, audio, ACPI, everything I feared might have problems was great out of the box with Kubuntu. No, I take it back, I had wireless problems whose origin I couldn't identify, and never solved, because I booted it up the next day and the problem was gone.

Right now, my only issue is that the touchpad button jams sometimes. But it was a cheap laptop, so I expected problems like that.

[baggyeyes]

I'll look into it. Thanks!

[ridicully]

This is probably not going to be very helpful to you, but I've been running Kubuntu on my old Lenovo R60 for a while now with more or less no problems.
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 :)

[baggyeyes]

You aren't the only one to notice the power consumption of Ubuntu: Mac OS X Power Consumption vs. Ubuntu 11.04, Windows 7

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.

[owlectomy]

Oh, this is useful, about the power consumption! My netbook runs really hot and I'm not sure whether it's age or the newer versions of Ubuntu. I'll try a lower-power distro and see if that makes a difference.

[catness]

Dell Inspiron Mini 1018 netbook with (K)Ubuntu 10.10. Everything worked right away, incl. audio and video, except for the wireless card driver which had to be installed manually. The touchpad is a bit flaky (the cursor tends to jump spontaneously), otherwise I'm very satisfied with the laptop.

[baggyeyes]

Did you buy it with Kubuntu, or did you have to remove Windows first?

[catness]

I removed Windows and installed Kubuntu from a USB flash drive which I prepared on another machine. According to the booklet that came with the laptop, it even used to ship either with Ubuntu or Windows (I think I've read somewhere that they discontinued the Linux versions).

[ratcreature]

I had very limited funds when my last laptop broke, so I was looking at low-end laptops with linux last December. I bought a HP 625 laptop for €400 that came with linux out of the box (you could also get it with windows, but that had less RAM and a smaller harddisk for the same price b/c of the windows cost) and it has been working great so far for my needs (which is basically internet browsing and such, watching DVDs, some GIMP, using emacs and every now and then a word processor, so it's not high end usage). Everything worked right away. Well, I reinstalled an Ubuntu over the trial SuSE Linux version it had out of the box, but I took note in advance of settings and drivers etc. just in case, however Ubuntu 10.10 recognized everything, though it did need some proprietary drivers (for the wireless and I think the video card) and I had to choose a different from default kernel for using all 4GB of my RAM. It also hang once when I chose to download updates during the first installation, but it was fine when I did it in two steps.

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.

[baggyeyes]

I remember your post about it. In Canada, I am not quite sure how many pre-configured with Linux options are available. Most of these (I haven't done a thorough search yet) are online vendors. Not a problem if one has a credit card one can use. I don't, unfortunately.

[ratcreature]

Mine was sold at a regular computer/electronics chain store, not anyone specialized. The linux options were rather limited though.

[baggyeyes]

There are no Linux options where I am - well, maybe one ever-so-slight possibility, but I would have to check them out and ask. Otherwise it's big box stores and ridding myself of Windows.

[sally_maria]

My first Linux computer was my laptop, which is a Packard Bell, and that pretty much "just worked". I don't remember having to do anything complicated to it at all.

Of course, there's no guarantee that a modern Packard Bell would be that easy, the goalposts seem to keep moving all the time.

[baggyeyes]

That's right, eh? What's screaming fast one year is dog-eared slow the next. Carla Schroder pointed out in her review of ZaReason's Teo Pro Netbook that the only thing that slowed down her netbook "were ghastly poorly-coded script-heavy Web pages. I laugh when people say "I just want some little old thing for Web surfing." Sorry, but you better have a quad-core for that."

Alack!

[asenathwaite]

I have a Dell 700m, which worked mostly fine until I dropped it recently. The only problem was the Broadcom wireless card, but supposedly there is a driver for that now, and if you're using dialup that wouldn't be a problem anyway.

If you're willing to look at used laptops and laptops that are a few years old, you can sometimes find really good deals.

[baggyeyes]

Yeah, I'm willing. That's why I asked about brand names. Overall, I haven't heard much bad about Dells and Linux.

[kerravonsen]

My most recent laptop is an ASUS EeePC (do netbooks count as laptops?). I wiped MS-Windows from it and installed Xubuntu off a USB stick. It's been fine.

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.

[baggyeyes]

Thanks for the links! Will do, if I go that route.

[blnchflr]

I've installed and successfully used Ubuntu (from 8.04 - 10.10; haven't gotten up the nerve to install 11.04 yet, because of what I hear about Unity) on a Medion, an Acer, and a Compaq (all cheap laptops).

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

[baggyeyes]

I think I'd get an Acer before Compaq, but that could be because of memories of their old desktops I had to work with at my last place of employment.

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.

[dragonwolf]

I know I'm kind of late to the game, but I run Ubuntu on both my Acer laptop and my desktop rig, both work flawlessly.

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.