I’ve been using laptops for a long time now. Not exclusively, but I’ve got plenty of experience with them. When it comes to hardware, laptops are nothing like any other systems. They use different motherboards, different graphics cards. Sometimes they use desktop components for things like memory, processors and network cards, but often those are specialized too. Laptops can be broken down into two major catagories: ultra-portable systems, designed for minimal weight and maximum battery life, and “desknotes”, often using desktop components, large screens, and powerful graphics systems. I personally prefer desknotes because I like having a lot of power under the hood.
Test System 1 (Primary system):
Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop
3.06GHz Mobile P4 w/ HyperThreading
256MB DDR SDRAM
30GB hard drive
64MB NVidia GeForce Go FX5200 graphics card
15″ SXGA screen
Broadcom 440x Ethernet card
Test System 2 (Secondary system):
HP Pavilion N3478 laptop
550MHz AMD K6-2 w/ 3dNow!
64MB SDRAM
6GB hard drive
4MB Trident CyberBlade chipset (shared memory)
12″ SVGA screen
In the past, I’ve had next to no success installing Linux on portable systems. In the past couple weeks, however, I decided to take another shot at it. I picked a bunch of Linux distributions to test, and here’s the first report. I just want to say this before I start: One of the most useful tools you can get is PartitionMagic 8. It lets you resize and play with partitions, non-destructively, from within Windows. Most people will be coming from Windows, and it’s nice to be able to work with partitions without losing data.
There are things you need to do before you start. Of course, make an accurate list of your hardware. “I have an ATI graphics card” isn’t going to cut it. You have to determine whether your laptop supports APM or ACPI power management. Finally, you *must* know what your monitor’s native resolution is. Before you start, disconnect all external mice and keyboards. If you’re going to use a network, modem, or anything else PC card, stick it in. On to the first review.
Red Hat Linux 9
To newcomers to Linux, Red Hat is possibly the most recognizable distribution. As such, new users are likely to gravitate towards Red Hat at some point.
I started off by downloading the three Red Hat 9 (Shrike) ISOs from various servers, and burning them to CD. Simple enough. Pop the first CD into your drive, reboot, and you’re off to the races. (Note: If you’re using something like BootMagic, disable it before you begin the install.
You’re greeted by a boot screen that offers a bit more information. You can start in graphical mode just by hitting enter. If you have problems with the default resolution, (doesn’t load properly, too big, etc.), you can change the resolution by restarting, and at “boot:”, type “linux resolution=AxB”, where A and B are your monitor’s native resolution. (Eg, “linux resolution=1024×768”). Also, try “linux lowres”. If things still won’t work, boot into the text-only installer by typing “linux text”. On my main system, I started the installation in graphical mode on my main system. On the older system, however, I couldn’t get it to run the graphical installer, so I ran it in text mode.
Past here, I won’t waste time with an over-descriptive walkthrough on the installation process. I’ll just highlight anyting in particular you should do to make things easier.
The installer offers the option to perform a media test. Unless you’ve had problems installing in the past, and had to restart, you can skip this step. It takes a lot of time. After this, you jump into a graphical installer. You have to enter what language you want to perform your installation in, and your type or keyboard. Next is mouse stuff. If your touchpad/eraserhead is already working, great. Take the default selection offered. In case it can’t autodetect your mouse/touchpad/eraserhead, however, you should try “Generic – 3 Button Mouse (PS/2)”. If that doesn’t work, try both the 2 button and the serial variants. If that still doesn’t work, experiment.
Once you’ve got that out of the way, you can move to the part where you can do really neat things, like installing stuff. 🙂
The installer will search for existing Red Hat installations. (Pardon the redundancy.) If there are any, it will ask you if you want to upgrade or perform a clean install. For our purposes, we will assume a full new installation. You will now be asked what type of system you would like to install. Pick “Personal Desktop”. Next, you get to partition your hard drive! What fun!
I won’t give details on the partitioning process. Suffice it to say that you need about a 50MB /boot partition, a swap partition equal to twice the size of your RAM, or 512MB. You can pick your own size for a root partition, but an average install will run between 1.5 and 2 GB. You then are forced to select a bootloader. You have your choice between LILO, GRUB, and not installing a bootloader at all. If you intend to use something like BootMagic, I’d suggest selecting GRUB and installing it on the first sector of your boot partition, NOT on your MBR.
When it comes to software, you have a fairly good selection. You can pick between KDE and Gnome for window managers. OpenOffice.org is included, as well as enough packages to make anyone short of a Debian user happy. In the package selection, however, there seems to be no laptop-specific software. After you pick your packages, it’ll take at least half an hour to install everything. For me, it took just over 40 minutes on my primary system, and about an hour and a half on my secondary system. Next is a quick network setup screen. If things go well, and your network card is detected, you’ll get an incomprehensible list of options. Pick through them and go ahead to the next screen. You’ll get the option to create a boot disk. Might as well.
Finally, there’s X configuration. You’ll get a suggestion for a video card driver, and also for a monitor. There’s a good chance you’ll get the generic vesa driver recommended. Red Hat doesn’t have a way to test your configuration before testing it, so it’s probably a good idea to take the default for now. Red Hat does a decent job of detecting your monitor. If you get a generic or unprobed monitor, however, scroll through the list and find your monitor. Red Hat’s done a good job here: every system I’ve tested has had their monitor listed somewhere in there. I was forced to use the vesa driver for both my systems, the “nv” driver doesn’t work with my graphics card on my main system, and there was no driver for my weird chipset on the secondary system. I used the probed values for my secondary system, but I was able to find my screen for my Inspiron.
After that, reboot and you can jump into your new Red Hat installation.
Assuming things went well, you should boot up to a graphical post-installer. You’re now prompted to make users, set up network stuff, et cetera. You finally get to a login screen once you’ve completed that final segment of installation.
Post-installation, I’m not all that happy. Red Hat doesn’t support the ethernet card on my Inspiron. I got drivers from the Broadcom website, but I never could get them installed. I ended up digging out an Intel Pro/100 ethernet PC card. Still no drivers for that, either. I remembered vaguely that Intel bought out Xircom or something, tried the Xircom PCMCIA drivers, and it worked fine. Go figure. On my secondary system, the PCMCIA 3Com network card I use worked fine. Finally, there seems to be no support for power management at all. Not APM, not ACPI. I looked on Red Hat’s website, and I still couldn’t find any information. A lot of modern laptops handle things like battery through the BIOS, but I would have liked to at least have a battery monitor.
Ratings:
Ease of Installation: 8/10
It’s hard to screw up. The availability of release notes during installation is a nice touch.
Partitioning: 6.5/10
Not only on my laptops, but even on other systems, I was never able to use the automatic partitioning. Personally, I didn’t mind, but in other cases, forcing a new user to deal with disk partitioning isn’t the best idea.
Software: 9/10
There’s a ton of software here. Pretty much everything you’ll need to be productive, except for things like battery monitors.
Hardware compatibility: 7/10
Major incompatibilities include my Broadcom 440x network card, as well as my NVidia Go FX5200 graphics card. I don’t like having to use generic drivers for a fairly mainstream card. Red Hat’s selection of drivers doesn’t seem to cover many mobile chipets, with the exception of ATI stuff. I’m extremely annoyed with its inability to get my network card running. Most other distributions I’ve tried have been able to, why can’t RH9? Good job on screens, though.
Power management: 1/10
No apparent support for power management features at all. At least it didn’t interfere with my BIOS running the show.
Personal feel: 7/10
I don’t like distributions that make me work just to get an internet connection going. I especially don’t like them when they refuse to work with my built-in ethernet card at all. I’m not surprised that I had to use generic drivers for my video cards, but that doesn’t make me a happy person. I am impressed, however, by how many screens and monitors are supported. It saves you from having to look up things like horizontal scan rate. Speed feels slightly slower than Windows XP on my main machine, but faster than Windows Me on my secondary.
Overall rating: 6.4/10
Red Hat’s lack of support for simple things like power management and network cards hurt it here. An excellent software package helps redeem it, but in the end, it’s not really suitable for a portable system. What good is an OS if you can’t even check your battery status?
About the Author:
Tyler Bancroft is a student from London, Ontario, Canada. Although he has no free time, if he did, he’d spend it playing with vintage computers, reading, and playing rugby.
this seems like a pointless review when Fedora on a laptop would make more sense.
Not necessarily. Red Hat Linux 9 is still supported by Red Hat (not for long though) and it is the last “consumer”-level Red Hat Linux product released as commercial. Fedora is a test bed and in my experience, full of bugs. If someone would be to review a Red Hat consumer OS, Red Hat Linux 9 would be it. Besides, RHL9 is less than 10 months old. What is it with people disgarding Linux distros every 3 months??
On a related note to the article, “Linux Laptops Expand Into SMB Market”: http://www.linuxpipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17408920
As I found when getting linux running properly on my emachines 5310 widescreen, Red Hat 9 is not friendly about a lot of common laptop hardware, most notably broadcom’s ethernet kit. Not that hard to believe when you consider the age of the RH 9.0 distro, though. SuSE 9 automatically found and correctly configured my broadcom ethernet adapter and my Radeon IGP 320M graphics adapter. The only thing it got wrong was the monitor which was easy to correct by choosing a generic LCD with the correct refresh rate and adding the real resolution of the laptop’s widescreen display.
What was so buggy about Fedora Eugenia? Have you installed the latest patches on Fedora? And yes, I’ve read the review.
On a side nore: what distro would you recommend me to use on a desktop system this days, for all purposes, from development to office stuff to gaming, you name it. What would you say the best distro would be?
Thanks allot.
And yes, Red Hat 9 was a cool release, but that’s about it.
I instaled RH9 in my laptop, no problems.
The battery monitor can be configured via gnome panel.
Ethernet card was detected.
Marc,
I really cannot recommend SuSE 9.0 enough as an excellent complete desktop solution. The package selection, ease of install, and low level of tinkering required to get a superb desktop up and running exceeds any experience I’ve had installing any *nix thus far. It’s a really stellar desktop and laptop OS.
GEW
>What was so buggy about Fedora Eugenia? Have you installed the latest patches on Fedora?
Yes, I have.
In a period of the first month of the release SEVERAL patches appeared. They should have updated their ISOs too instead of expecting all people to use their multi-megabyte updates. Fedora Core 1 was simply too buggy (much more than any other well-known distro or Red Hat version) and it has other problems too that they haven’t being addressed yet (like the “Start” button pausing on many occasions instead of showing the gnome memu).
>what distro would you recommend me to use on a desktop system this days
Either SuSE, Mandrake or Fedora indeed. Despite Fedora’s problems, the sad thing is that is becoming the Linux’s market standard where devs are testing with and so making it the best bet for people looking for app compatibility. But then again, Windows 95 used to be like that too, didn’t mean that Win95 was actually good.
I bought a second-hand Toshiba Satellite 4300:
PIII-700
12GbHD
192Mb RAM
14.1″TFT
Xircom PCMCIA 10/100
I installed Fedora Core 1 on it and everything was detected perfectly, including power management. The only thing that I haven’t tested is the inbuilt Winmodem, which may be a problem, but as mine is only used stand-alone or on a network this has not been a consideration.
Fedora is excellent and I use it now on my home and work PCs too. It’s wonderful being Windows-free. :-))))))
I found problems in redhat 9, when I installed it after doing a clean install from 8 my wireless ethernet card didn’t work. It was auto-detected (orinoco card) under 8 but, to get 9 working I had to install an old kernel, install the redhat 8 rpm for pcmcia-cs to go wireless. A few of my other friends had hardware problems. I would not recommend RH9 becausee of my experiences.
RH9 installed without ANY problem on my Tecra. Nothing to configure (except shrinking the Windows partition). Everything recognized immediately and configured automatically, including Ethernet, Video and external mouse.
My own evaluation is:
Ease of Installation: 10/10. Always works. Always reliable. Easy.
Partitioning: 7/10. Still have to enter numbers instead of modifying graphically (but I’m pushingit).
Repartitioning: 0/10. I used Suse 8.2 (partitionMagic) to repartition
Software: 9/10. Good selection. ONly bit missing is configuring Applciations under Gnome, and the fact that RH9 uses Gnome 2.2 instead of 2.4
Hardware compatibility: 9/10: The best of all distros I tried.
Power management: 0/10: can Hibernate but does not interface with Toshiba’s custom features at all 🙁
Personal feel: 9/10: Suse is way behind. And I do not mention the lesser known distros. Only Fedora is better.
I have a Dell C600 Latitude. I have run Redhat 9, Fedora, and about any other incarnation of Redhat before that. I will say that save the common problems with Fedora (that eugenia mentions, menus and such) I have no problem with it at all running it on my Laptop, and use it daily.
BTW I haven’t had any troubles with auto partitioning. Except that I prefer my machine have a seperate home partition, and the battery applet has alway worked for me.
Also, I think that Fedora was a step in the right direction, but FC2, I think will be a better gelling of efforts.
I know RH9 is a bit outdated. It’s just a beginning, this is going to be a kind of mini-series. Right now, I’m writing a review of Libranet 2.8, which is Debian based. So far, I’m quite impressed with it.
> I needed to wait a month for SEVERAL patches to appear.
Yes, the Q&A was bad, but who doesn’t miss things?:)
> They should have updated their ISOs too instead of expecting all people to use their multi-megabyte updates.
This makes the point of using Fedora by people on dial-up moot. But then again, mandrake is worst in this regard. SuSE has patch-rpms wich improve the overall situation.
> ike the “Start” button pausing on many occasions instead of showing the gnome memu
What “Start” button?
> Either SuSE, Mandrake or Fedora indeed.
Mandrake 9.2 is far buggier than FC1. After aplying all the updates after a fresh install, all the menus disappeared in KDE/GNOME. No biggie, I loaded the menus in Mdk’s menu editor and that fixed the problemm. RPMDRAKE locks on random ocassions when it solves dependencies. Imagine after 30 minutes of selecting apps how I felt. Everything wine related brackes. WineX doesn’t work properly, Quick Time in the latest CrossOver Pluggin hangs when I right click the mouse.
>Fedora’s problems, the sad thing is that is becoming the Linux’s market standard where devs are testing with and so making it the best bet for people looking for app compatibility. But then again, Windows 95 used to be like that too, didn’t mean that Win95 was actually good.
I like your analogy:) But Win95 was a nightmare for me back in the day.
What do you think about SuSE 9? Would it make a good desktop?
I don’t use Windows anymore at home, so my machines are linux only. I don’t care eather installing every 6 month or so on all of them.
Thanks, Marc.
>Yes, the Q&A was bad, but who doesn’t miss things?:)
No one should be missing SO MANY things, please, let’s be objective over here! Fedora core 1 was and continues to be very buggy. For me, this distro is unacceptable, and thus I only use it very occasionally when I have software that doesn’t run on my Slackware because its developers only tested it on RHL/fedora.
>What “Start” button?
I don’t need your sarcasm if you don’t have something constructive to say about the gnome’s menu terrible pausing that happens very often out of the blue.
I thought this review was going to teach me on how to setup Laptop power management features under linux.
All I read was how to install Redhat9 (not even that).
How did you test that it didn’t support APM or ACPI? You could have at least put that in the review.
normally i just lurk here because there are very interesting articles. but i have to add something now:
eugenia, i have used redhat 7.3, 8.0, 9 and fedora 1 on my compaq presario 2800. all of them worked flawlessly after some minor patching (ok, i don’t care about power management, but who really cares?)
fedora is a very fine distro. there were 1 or 2 gripes with it, the most remarkable being the broken redhat-config-packages. otherwise, what was so horribly bad about this distro? i use it in 2 computers, every day, and i can’t recall seing it crash. gnome 2.4 is fine, the kernel is stable. java works, flash works, openoffice is great, mozilla too.
so what? i really don’t see any big problems. and these days, the new redhat magazine comes out with fedora core 1A on it and there you’ll get your updated isos (regrettably only in germany, austria and italy AFAIK).
regards,
marillchen
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/
there you go. as it seems, they are planning to do an english version too, so it’ll be available in the us too…
regards,
marillchen
I really loved Redhat, but then I sold my desktop and got an laptop. Redhat could regonize my ibm usb2 pcmcia card (same with fedora).
So I installed slackware and compile the 2.6 kernel. Everything perfect now. pcmcia, acpi, cpufreq now problems.
“>What “Start” button?
I don’t need your sarcasm if you don’t have something constructive to say about the gnome’s menu terrible pausing that happens very often out of the blue.”
I didn’t mean it as sarcasm, but I don’t recall that the “Main Menu” button was actually called the “Start” button, as in windows “Start” button. So I ment no sarcasm, I really didn’t know what you ment.
Could you please answer the last part of my previous post about SuSE 9, I really value your oppinions.
Thanks, Marc
John, you’re right, I could have been more specific. I have an ACPI-complient BIOS. My BIOS handles things like battery charging. It partially passes control of things like standby to the OS. In Windows and Red Hat 8, closing the lid of my system, for example, will drop the system into standby. RH8 was ACPI compliant. I looked through Red Hat’s site, and couldn’t find information about ACPI. Therefore, I assume it is not ACPI compliant.
And also, in future reviews, I will describe how to set up power management. This wasn’t meant to be a comprehensive, step-by-step walkthrough of how to install Red Hat. It was meant to be a fairly streamlined set of tips, with emphasis on things specific to mobile systems. I’m a novice writer, people. Any *constructive* comments are welcome.
And on another note, I’m looking for distro ideas for after Libranet. Any suggestions?
I went ahead and bought a Sager 5680(www.pctorque.com) instead of the Dell 5150 because Dell refused to let me swap in an ATI Mobile Radeon 9600 128 meg for the crappy Nvidia card they’re trying to pawn off. It’s a p4 3.0 ghz, 1 gig of ram, the ati card, some realtek internal ethernet, and a linksys WPC11 v.4 pcmcia wireless card.
I actually used knoppix to get a somewhat working XFree86-4 card. It detected my wireless mouse and touchpad appropriately. I also used Knoppix to repartion my ntfs xp pro drive for dual-boot.
I think some distros might package the closed source Nvidia and ATI drivers these days, but most won’t and you’ll have to install them from the manufacturers site. I actually used some xfree86cfg tool from ATI and then merged in the XFRee86-4 cfg file from knoppix that had the correct wireless mouse and touchpad settings. no big deal. Slackware doesn’t do that much in the way of autodetecting, but i knew the card, chose it, and it works fine.
My biggest problem was wireless, which was a problem on XP too. Pctorque.com actually gives you an option to not have an operating system installed or shipped which is nice because it saved me $150 or so, so i had to install XP Pro too, which didn’t configure the card properly, so i de-installed it and then re-installed.
Under Slackware the drivers for my card, which happens to use a Realtek 8180 chipset are out there for linux, but it’s a wrapper around a proprietary binary(ala Nvidia and I guess ATI), so you compile it yourself for your kernel. It won’t work for any kernel version above 2.4.21 and it’s unstable on my slackware system(it crashes when i try and take it down), but it does work.
All in all I’ve been very happy with Slack 9.1 current on ths desknote. I love it’s simplicity. I got sick of debian doing everything the debian-way. I just installed KDE-rc1 last night and I’m loving it.
If you don’t mind writing down a couple hardware specs from your XP system info, I’d give Slackware a shot. The installer is ncurses, but big dead. It does the job its intended to do. I guess a little bit more hardware detection would be nice, but no big deal
that sometimes.
I think the point about RH 9 being old makes sence for only one reason, this guy is using a 1 month old laptop on a year old distro. I have a 1 month old PC on fedora and had a few bugs, but with patches seems to be stabilizing.
There needs to be a standard way for reviews. If my netcard doesn’t work it gets a -5 but if it does, then RH gets a 9/10
what kinda crap is that? If you’re doing a review for something shouldn’t you make sure the hardware is supported?
thats kinda like buying a craftsman kit from sears and complaining that the kit doesn’t work on a bowing 747. sure craftsman has them but you better make sure what kit you buy.
Why test it with RedHat Linux 9 – a distro that is a year old. One year is a long time when it comes to Linux – changes happen. Try Fedora Core 1, then run up2date, then redo your review.
It’s like posting a review on GNOME 2.2 or XFce 3 – you are a year behind.
I’ve considered trying Slack before, but never really got around to it. I’ll put it on the list. I’ve tried at least 5 distros on this system, and the only one that came with the Nvidia drivers was SuSE 9. I don’t really care, though, I’d rather use the vesa drivers and have a stable system, than use the Nvidia drivers and have problems. Slackware. Anything else?
Battry status is available in Gnome and GKrellM. GKrellM supports many laptop features.
The linux drivers for my ATI Radeon 9600 Mobile Pro work flawlessly. This card is very fast.
See
http://www.linux-laptop.net/
before install any linux distribuition on a laptop. It saves time and headaches.
Just download the nvidia drivers tarball from Nvidia and recompile it for your kernel. You don’t have to wait for a distro to put it out for you. It’s trivial. Seriously, I hate to see you sitting around in Vesa land when you have some serious opengl loving for you, plus your not getting the 2d acceleration.
It’s not like I used a single hardware platform to test it out. I used two separate laptops and worked them through fully. The Broadcom network card I have worked fine in SuSE 9, SuSE 8.2, Mandrake 9.2. With a bit of tweaking, it worked in Libranet 2.8 and 2.7. I then tried my Intel Pro/100 card, which is a mainstream piece of hardware. No support for that until I figured out to use the Xircom drivers.
This was a kind of test review. I intend on writing more reviews, of more recent distros. I wrote this to see what people did and didn’t like, and to get constructive comments for future reviews.
I used RH9 because it’s a mature, stable distro, that I thought I could use as a baseline for other reviews. I was wrong there.
I just bought an ASUS M2400N centrino laptop and it runs *great* with Debian Sarge, kernel 2.6.1 and XFree86 4.3.
I would recommend this setup to anyone wanting a Linux laptop. The price is good. Quality is high and you don’t have to pay Windows tax when you buy it.
Yellow Dog Linux is essentially a PPC port of Red Hat 9, thoughtfully configured to support pretty much all Mac hardware. Has to be the best RH on a laptop. Everything works, including wireless and power management support. Worth finding a secondhand PowerBook.
the power management functions.
I know ACPI is almost there, but until ‘suspend to RAM’ (standby in Windows) and ‘suspend to disk’ (hibernate in Windows) is 100% stable and able to be configured easily, Linux on a laptop is just a pipe dream.
I have a Toshiba Satellite A30 running Mandrake 9.2. The basic ACPI functionality is there, but closing the lid DOES NOT put the system into hibernation nor does pressing the power button put it into standby.
If these functions do work 100% correctly, where are the docs/HOW-TO’s to configure them properly.
I’m running a rh9/linux 2.6.1 on my thinkpad T30 notebook. Upon installation all the hardware was recognized adequately except for the 802.11b card, which I installed manually. It’s a P4 2GHz, 512 of DDR, 40 GB HDD, DVD/CDRW, etc, etc. XD2 has been performing fairly well on it and I don’t think I’ll be replacing the distro any time soon.
Wireless and ACPI issues are the biggest stumbling blocks to linux and laptops these days. Almost all the 3d chips are supported, since most are ATI or Nvidia anyway, with some of the integrated chips like Intel being supported too. My problem is that I can’t upgrade to a 2.6.x kernel with my current wireless, where ACPI is supposedly much better. Since i’m using my notebook as a desktop replacement, it doesn’t bother me as much, but the wireless driver is not stable at all.
I must say that thinkpads seem to have the best support. I have Redhat 8 installed on a T23; detected all of my hardware without a single config. Bought a linksys 802.11b card and that worked without installing a thing. The only thing I’ve had to mess with was a grub boot config to load SCSI emulation for the DVD/CD-RW drive (burning would not work without). Other than that, it was just install the software I wanted and go! I’m happy.
Good points. The wireless is an issue, but I’m not too worried that at the moment.
I’m wanting to move to Gentoo (with 2.6 kernel), but I can’t find any docs on how to set up ACPI correctly with regard to hibernation/standby. I would have thought that that would have been a major issue trying to get Linux to work on a laptop correctly. If Lindows can do it with their laptop edition, why can’t other distros. I haven’t tried FreeBSD 5.2 yet, but if those issues that I have talked about with regard to ACPI and hibernation/standby work and have good documentation, I’ll move to that instead of Gentoo.
These are kinda older laptops though:
Laptop: IBM 1400i
NIC: Netgear FA511 (works with tulip)
Distro: Debian Woody (bf24) and Slack 8.1
Status: 100% functioning.
Laptop: Micron Transport ZX
NIC: 3Com 3C575 (works with boomerang)
Distro: Debian Woody (bf24), Slack 9.1, RH 9
Status: 100% functioning
I guess I’m just lucky..
I have a Dell Inspiron and tried RH, Mandrake, SuSe and Mepis Linux. There seemed to be some problem with each one of them. The only distro that completely satisfied me after getting it all set up was Slackware 9.0.
Can’t tell exactly but i have noticed that Toshiba’s laptop are not really … alternative OSs ready.
As far as i have read in forums, sometime, it frozes, others, it simply doesn’t boot.
I guess I’m just lucky..
Can’t tell exactly but i have noticed that Toshiba’s laptop are not really … alternative OSs ready.
As far as i have read in forums, sometime, it frozes, others, it simply doesn’t boot.
Ugly truth ? ACPI first appeared on windows platform in win98 and became solid around win2k.
IMHO, this is the consequences of linux’s relying on BIOS for suspending to hard disk for too long.
This wasn’t a review. It was a HOW-TO with some arbitrary scores attached to the end.
Serves no purpose except to attempt to make Linux sound bad.
Meanwhile lots more M$ puff pieces on the front page.
Quick, better censor that!
“Can’t tell exactly but i have noticed that Toshiba’s laptop are not really … alternative OSs ready.”
My Tsoshiba Satellite A30 likes booting into Linux with no troubles. The only things that won’t work is the modem which is based on the Agere/Lucent Scorpio chipset, and the hibernation/standby functions which is ACPI based.
Thanks for clearing that up a bit. But you could have mentioned this in your review that RH8 and ACPI work fine.
Again, there’s obviously some stuff I left out here that I should’ve put in. Again, I’m a first-time writer. If there’s anything in particular people want to see in the next review, please say so.
As much of an idiot as you are for saying something ridiculous like that… this review was about Linux on laptops.
Linux Laptop servers, maybe?
Okay I read your post fair enough.
As for constructive criticism you did fine but this is a basic run of the mill “I installed and this is what happened” so mistakes are okay since joe-six pack would have the same issues. Nearly all of the ratings are based on installation problems and in the two that aren’t (software & personal feel) you still spend most of that time talking about your card.
If you plan on doing a debian vs. suse or red hat review I suggest you do some serious question asking and FAQ readings. Nearly every review I read the person is good at one OS and not the other saying things are left out when infact they’re not, the reviewer just isn’t aware of it. example;
I read a review recently that said fedora wasn’t secure cause sendmail was on by default but he didn’t know that it was only open to localhost and anyone scanning it would not see anything. or what exec-shield was or that X isn’t even listening. he went on to praise the other distro cause you could auto-login at boot without a pass but start -> system settings -> login screen has the same option.
Not saying you did anything bad, just to watch for it on your future ones.
I’m running Fedora Core 1 on a Toshiba 5105. Enabling ACPI was as simple as adding “acpi=on” to the kernel boot line. Battery monitor, wireless (802.11b) temperature, fan control, etc. all work. I don’t use hibernation or suspend, but the online information I’ve read for my laptop indicates that it works if I wanted to set it up ( http://www.linux-laptop.net/ ). There are utilities (like http://sourceforge.net/projects/tclkeymon/ and http://www.janerob.com/rob/ts5100/index.shtml ) that make the keyboard special functions (screen brightness, mute, CD player control, etc.) button all work. Admittedly, these are add-on utilities, and not part of the distribution. Similarly, on Windows, I would have to load the Toshiba utilities to get the same functions working (Windows XP has no support for them).
The bottom line is that laptops are unique and very individual devices. If you try to install only the retail boxed version of Windows XP on a laptop, much of the functionality won’t be there. You will need to collect drivers from the vendor or component manufacturer sites to build a system similar to the configuration as it comes pre-installed.
If this is the functionality that you are looking for, but don’t want to learn how to do (for either Windows or Linux), have a geek friend install and customize the system for you. I’ve done this for several people, and they have all been very happy with the result.
On the other hand, as others have pointed out Apple laptops running YellowDog Linux function very well (because of the well defined hardware in Apple products — fewer variables make easier support). I have an Apple Powerbook, and YellowDog supported everything out of the box, including suspending the machine when the lid is closed (though I disabled it, since I don’t use that functionality).
The other option is to go to any of the Linux hardware vendors and actually buy your laptop with Linux pre-installed! That way, you don’t pay the Microsoft tax for an OS you don’t plan to use. While the vendors of these machines may be “no-name”, in actuallity they are selling the same hardware as many larger vendors (who buy their machines from overseas and slap a label on it). Exactly what part of a “Dell” laptop is made by Dell, other than the logo?
always make sure the hardware is linux compatible before u buy the product!
especially for laptops.
linux on laptop means test, tweak, workaround.
this no troll but truth.
i hope one day linux will work out of the box on any laptop.
am i dreaming?
laptop recommendation: ibm t4x dell. mine compaq x1000 (workaround for suspend others work fine)
The bottom line is that laptops are unique and very individual devices. If you try to install only the retail boxed version of Windows XP on a laptop, much of the functionality won’t be there. You will need to collect drivers from the vendor or component manufacturer sites to build a system similar to the configuration as it comes pre-installed.
The difference is that the drivers for windows are available, and for linux it is next to zero.
Actually, for Windows XP, suspend to RAM and hibernation don’t need drivers. For example, I have a Sony VIAO 505GX which is a laptop designed for win98 and I got around 1998. Sony doesn’t offer any XP drivers for this particular model, yet XP works beautifully on it, with susptending to RAM/disk and special keys like adjusting volume, screen contrast without any trouble.
always make sure the hardware is linux compatible before u buy the product!
especially for laptops.
linux on laptop means test, tweak, workaround.
this no troll but truth.
In other words, freedom doesn’t ring in this area for linux.
For windows XP, suspend to disk doesn’t need ACPI, the feature will work with APM based systems.
thanks to TBancroft for sharing his RH9 experience, and that’s an awesome powerful laptop you’ve got there !
I was hoping the issue of audio/sound support would come up in this long discussion, but I guess I will be the first one. I haven’t tried RH9 but every distro I’ve experimented with could not use my laptop sound card – the dreadful Neomagic 256AV (laptop is an Acer Travelmate 720TX by the way).
Libranet 2.7 could recognize and actually loads successfully (during post-install config) the module for Neomagic. however, during boot I get the message something like not AC97 compliant, try forcing AC97, and then of course, no sound.
and I tried OSS/Linux too but it says it’s just not compatible with the kernel version (2.4.19, shipped with Libranet 2.7). I heard that kernel 2.6, with ACPI support could potential solve the audio problems I’ve been having. given that I’m a newbie, however, it’ll be a awhile before I get to actually do compile kernels and experiment 😉
how was audio/sound card support in your case ? ‘d be glad to hear about your stories.
Works well, even suspend to ram, wireless, etc. See http://www.isrec.isb-sib.ch/~agrosdid/fedora_dell.html
Yes, i got it working!
I removed all partitions from HD and pre-partitioned (15GB FAT + rest as FAT) with Knoppix before recovering WinXPain, then RH 9 install where removed second FAT and then according to normal RH 9 install.
When compared this RH 9 in Acer laptop to my desktop (AMD XP 1700+, 512MB DDR, Radeon 9100, SiS 735, IBM GXP75 HDD), laptop works much better, is consistent and in full hobby/work use all the time!
But there was alot of problems, first was with Broadcom NIC, second with ACPI.
Actual installation went as expected, but very slowly (full install about two hours, compared to less than 30 minutes with Mandrake 9.1).
Because this Acer carries with alot of interesting features, the fine-tuning took couple of weeks and still not yet all the way completed. Following is my list of things working:
– using kernel 2.4.22 (2.6 waiting till enough time…)
– ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 (from install, with 1400×1050)
– ACPI (with kernel update with latest ACPI patches
– Broadcom LAN (BCM 4401, kernel update and b44 module)
– Intel WinModem (with slmdm-2.7.10)
– Synaptics Touchpad (synaptics-0.11.3; beware for frozen laptop if touchpad disabled and X11 (re)started without external mouse…)
– Centrino CPU throttling to save battery and cpu fan noise (kernel upgrade with cpufreq 20031107 for kernel 2.4 and cpufreqd_1.1-rc1 daemon)
– Centrino WLAN (PRO/Wireless 2100, with driverloader; not tried with ndiswrapper)
– Broadcom 54G Mini-PCI 802.11g WLAN (BCM94306, from HP nx9003, with ndiswrapper)
– Bluetooth (RH9 stock seems to work, added BlueZ rpms, got to connect to Siemens S55 BT phone but GSM-data/GPRS dial-up not successful so not completed).
Not really tried IrDa (not needed), FireWire (no cable for mini-connector) and hibernation (mostly for security reasons; i have encrypted homes etc…); DVD/CD-RW works as expected but doesn’t burn ultra-speed disks.
-Mika
shameless plug! http://www.emperorlinux.com/
I run a dual boot, about which some points will be made. First, you can specify what you want at purchase time at the above URL. But, being too cool for that, I re-did the machine myself.
I learned the hard way that, if you want to do this, you start with your Redmond product. Redmond does not respect your MBR and partition table, and will queer them beyond usability.
Thus, I made a 20G NTFS partition, a 20G FAT32 partition (called DMZ, for de-militarized zone), and left 20G raw, for my Linux.
(install Redmond product)
Now, install RH9. Configure it to mount the FAT32 under /mnt/dmz . The advantage here is that I can keep all of my working files in one place, and use backup2l.
It gets better. (The rest of this is rather application-specific, and may be off-topic for OSNews)
Having had a horrible .pst disaster, I fired Outlook. I installed the Mozilla suite under Windows, and pointed its mail folders to the DMZ volume, then booted RH9, installed the Mozilla suite, and pointed it to the same folders on /mnt/dmz . Totally factored out the OS!
Not as successful on the PIM front.
The Palm desktop under windows and JPilot under Linux use distinct file formats. My Kyocera 7035 uber-phone, itself, works as the pivot point for the data. Alas, no integration between mail client and PIM software, a real advantage of Outlook ( but your .pst format .pisst me off ).
Other subtleties emerge. Linux doesn’t support symlinks on a FAT32 partition (those deeper than I filesystems are likely saying ‘duh’). Thus, trying to build Boost (http://boost.org) on my DMZ misses all of the symlink targets. So much for a single, OS-agnostic, library tree.
Furthermore, console sessions under WinXP can’t seem to switch from c: to d: .
In summary, it’s kind of cool configuration, but the goal of making the OS as unintrusive as the BIOS will likely never be attained.
I had no problems with sound, but the sound chipset in my Inspiron is an Intel i810. That’s about as mainstream as you can get. I’ll try to find a system with a Neomagic 256AV and poke around, but no promises.
I have been using RH9 on my laptop (Fujitsu) nearly 2 years without serious problems. Ive used it as my main os along with windows.However, word processing is the only thing i do in windows , the rest of work which includes programming and surf web, is handled well by RH9. I found that RH9 is the most suitable os for laptop due to its completeness , easy to install, stable , secure and quite attractive appearance. Specially , i dont need speending money for NAV like most of people working with windows xx. Hopefully , next versions will be better .
if it does not support any sort of power management, then it should get a zero rating. a laptop with no power management is fairly worthless.
i wish reviewers would get over the reviews which walk step by step through some long laborious install process. We’re past that already! The best distros install in 10 mins and recognize everything (see LindowsOS).
There was no reason to try Redhat 9 – when Fedora core 1 was available. – and works really well on laptops.
– APM works
– speedstep works (with a little tweaking)
– supports laptop_mode
– XFree86 has 3D drives for most ATI cards (as in ThinkPads)
– yum works well – for updates and 3rd party repositories.
I’m using it on a T40 – and everything I want works well – I had to install the madwifi driver to get wireless working.
Also, If comparing distributions – do compare Fedora Core1 with SUSE 9 or Mandrake 9.2 (nor RHL9) – as these are comparable distributions – with similar kernel versions etc – and should have similar hardware support.
I’d like to suggest trying JAMD linux on your laptop. I just installed it on a 1.3 GHz Duron based desktop PC, and I am very impressed; it’s based on Red Hat 9, but for desktop use, is far, far, far better than RH 9. Unlike Red Hat 9, multimedia and KDE work properly in JAMD,as does CD-burning without any manual tweaking whatsoever. More goodness: apt-get for RPM is installed with Synaptic for a front-end, and used as the default software installation/removal system. It works flawlessly, and no more RPM dependency hell. JAMD includes the first really good online how-to’s I’ve seen – in HTML with screenshots, the way Apple does them, so that ordinary people can follow along and do tasks like install software, set up Kppp to dial via modem, etc, etc. The menus are cleaned up and minimalistic (you won’t find seven text editors or five typse of terminal apps!), which makes them much more effective to use for new users; power users can always use the command-line or Alt-F2 to launch whatever program they wish.
If I were to update my elderly mother-in-law’s OS (she’s currently using Mandrake 9.1), I would probably install JAMD 0.0.6b. I’m that impressed by it. (don’t be put off by the early release number, this distro oozes quality and stability!).
Just so everyone is informed, JAMD’s main developer (Jim Lucha) recently decided to merge his talents with the developers of Blue Linux, creating a new distro to be called Ares destop ( http://www.ares-linux.com ); immediately after the merger, he decided he wanted nothing more to do with the project, and bowed out. According to the Ares Linux website, however, the project is on track to release the first version of Ares Desktop in Feb 2004. I believe it’ll be based on Fedora Core 1; hopefully it will continue the tradition set by JAMD of being far better than its starting point!
In the meantime, the existing release of JAMD linux (0.0.6b)
is still a far better choice than some newer but flakier distros (Mandrake 9.2, anyone?). Search Google for download sites – I found CD’s for $3.95 at
http://www.osdisc.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi/products/linux/jamd/install_…
and a free downloadable iso at
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/platform/linux/JAMD/
-Gnobuddy
Dude!!
Upgrade your kernel. Dont worry about the drivers at the time of installation. 50% of the vendors either do not disclose their h/w spec to opensource community or just delay it so that M$ gets it first. So, if you have latest laptop with all those graphics chips upgrade the kernel and download the latest drivers.
Quote: “Power Management: No apparent support for power management features at all. At least it didn’t interfere with my BIOS running the show.”
If you install KDE on my laptop, the Power Management is available which it is not the case if you use Gnome as GUI desktop.
I have a broadcom NIC,
modprobe b44
NIC works beautifully.
I’ve been using rh9 on my laptop. It came with 8, but I upgraded right after FC1 came out. I’m always one behind…
The only complaint I’ve had is my sound stops working if I have a gui running and then go to sleep mode. If I don’t have X running, this doesn’t happen: sound will come back up.
Also, I got a reallly crappy video card so I can’t get 3d working. It’s a S3 Savage.
#1: install mandrake
#2: install the suspend-scripts package
#3: add the resume parameter to your kernel parameters in lilo or grub configuration. set it to your swap partition. e.g.:
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=”linux”
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append=”devfs=mount resume=/dev/hda6″
vga=791
read-only
#4: reboot (re-run lilo if necessary).
#5: run pmsuspend as root. hope.
for quite a lot of systems, that’ll work. you’re suspended to disk. works on my VAIO C1XD.
btw, Mandrake probably isn’t necessary – I just don’t know if / how other distributions package the pmsuspend script. If anyone knows where it is on other distros, please post
I think the reviewer misunderstands how the BIOS and O/S interact to provide power management. “leaving it to the BIOS” requires O/S support for things to work correctly.
With the exception of Toshiba win-laptops (“legacy free”), all APM capable laptops I’ve ever used had great power management under Linux. I’ve currently got two Dells and an IBM here, all running RH9, with 2-3.5 hours battery life, suspend/resume, etc…
You may find a lot more installation reports at http://linux-on-laptop.com/ and http://tuxmobil.org/ . There is also the Linux-Mobile-Guide http://tuxmobil.org/howtos.html which explaines in detail how to install and use Linux with latops, notebooks, PDAs and mobile cell phones.