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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).
no subject
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.