Today, there is no shortage of reviews on Linux on the Desktop, but I think we can benefit from more “Laptopized-Linux” experiences. As laptops keep dropping in price and increasing in terms of computing power, they really make a nice platform even for cpu intensive applications such as sofware development, desktop publishing, web design, etc. And as you will see in this article, installing Linux on a laptop is not as hairy as you may think.
I recently had the opportunity to setup a new Linux-running laptop after the demise of my trusty Sony Vaio. The goal of this article is to learn together from the ups and downs that I’ve gone through in installing and using Linux on the new laptop. In summary, it’s light-years on the positive side compared to just a few years ago.
NOTE: This article is written based on the experience of using Linux on a laptop in a full-time (8 hrs a day) job as a Senior Developer/Build Manager of a software development shop.
Choosing a Distro:
Having cut my teeth on Slackware, Caldera, Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, (and in more recent years, Gentoo and Knoppix) I have gone through pretty much all flavors of major distributions, therefore in this article, far be it for me to inflame the “oh-so-combustible” distro-war. Having said that, I chose Ubuntu “Warty” as the distro for the following reasons:
1. Ubuntu being pretty recent, has a huge selection of mature applications. Many have said that Ubuntu provides a pretty seamless desktop experience. I just have to see it for myself.
2. Knowing that Ubuntu is also debian-based, is enough to give me another reason to try it. Let me explain: For those who are new to Linux, one of the joy of using Linux is the freedom to choose from the ungodly amount of free applications out there. So having a robust and reliable package manager is a paramount matter. My recent experiences with debian-based distros like Knoppix have made me fall in love with the apt-get package management system in terms of reliability (90% of the time it does what it says it will do) and robustness (recovers from errors without messing up the whole system). I have been “dependency-burned” a few times using rpm-based package manager in my Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake days, but on the other hand I also have good friends who swear by it, so again, no distro-war here. NOTE: I read several reviews that mention debian in a bad light regarding ease of use, to that end, I suggest using Synaptic (type in: apt-get install synaptic), the front end to apt-get.
3. Since my SuSe days, I’ve been using KDE as the Desktop Manager. When I tried Gnome many years ago, I remembered it as a non-attractive alternative for KDE. So when I found out that Ubuntu is using the latest version of Gnome as the DM of choice, the tinkerer in me just can’t stand the temptation to revisit Gnome. And boy, I am impressed. Now, before you KDE fans start typing nasty comments, read on and discover that KDE comes into the picture just fine later in this article.
4. Why not Ubuntu “Hoary”? It’s not officially out yet at time of writing. Yeah, I’m rather dissapointed too, I heard it’s supposed to be quite an improvement from “Warty”.
Choosing a Laptop:
After drooling over the IBM Thinkpad T41p for months, I decided that I’ve got to have one someday. Unfortunately that day is not today, the $1000 extra price tag is enough to motivate me to find an alternative. Enter the HP dv1000 series (dv1156cl to be exact, but hey, who’s counting?). It is recent enough (with all the bells and whistles that you expect from today’s “multimedia” laptops). It is light enough at 5.5lbs, it is powerful enough (1.7Mhz Pentium M, 512MB, 60GB HD), and it is attractive enough (if you squint your eyes hard, from a distance, it looks like a 15-inch PowerBook <more droool!!>) with a beautiful glass-like wide-aspect-ratio screen and a sleek silver outer finish. Internal wi-fi, dvd burner, harman/kardon speakers, QuickPlay(TM) feature, and memory card reader sweetened the deal. I’m sold.
NOTE: Ever since I bought this laptop, I see a guy/gal with Thinkpad in *every* darn Starbucks(TM) that I visited. There they are, typing away… mocking me, taunting me…
The Installed OS:
Like every good Microsoft-agreement-bound PC manufacturers, HP preinstalled the Windows XP Home SP2 with my new laptop. What to do then? Well, simple enough, I decided to go with dual-booting. I still need Windows because some of the software that I wrote runs on Windows and I am still working on them.
I went online and actually found couple of reviews about installing linux on this particular laptop. I eagerly read all of them but I got mixed signals, one guy can’t resize the Windows XP partition successfully using Partition Magic, the other had the hard drive repartitioned from the factory. So I am back to square one. Then after searching some more, I came across this site, which assured me that NTFS resizing is completely doable from linux, which is good because I have no desire to fork out money for Partition Magic. The site also suggested this cute linux distro.
After downloading the .iso and burning it onto a cute 180MB mini-disc (yes, I’m a sucker for cuteness), I inhaled deeply and stick it into my new laptop to boot from. No go! it hangs when attempting to detect some pci stuff. Then, tapping into The Force (also known as “Google” lately), I gather that I need to put “noapic” as one of the kernel parameter when booting. While I was there, I also disable the network detection (using a nice curses-based menu interface, I might add) because all I’m interested in is repartitioning the hard drive. Voila! a minute later, I’m in.
Then, firing off QTParted (by typing run_qtparted in the prompt), I proceeded to resize the Windows XP partition. Simple, eh? well hold on, QTParted said that it can’t resize the partition because of some “accounting error.” After scratching my head and mumbling inside “what on God’s green earth does accounting has to do with a disk partition??,” I searched the net and found out that the error basically tells me that I need to run chkdsk from Windows. True enough, after rebooting into Windows, chkdsk /f detected and recovered some lost sectors. And then I was able to reboot, rerun QTParted and resize the partition without a hitch.
NOTE: Wait a minute, doesn’t this mean a linux program just correctly detected inconsistencies on a Microsoft proprietary file system? Amazing isn’t it!
Lesson learned:
– “noapic” is typically required as boot parameter when installing Linux on laptops
– QTParted is able to safely resize NTFS partitions (no partition move, though)
– Sys Rescue CD (very small) rocks!!
Installation Experience:
Having created a living space for Ubuntu, I went ahead and pop in the Ubuntu disc — which unlike Knoppix, will fit in a 650MB disc — and then rebooted. Greeted with the Ubuntu boot screen, I eagerly watch the boot process scrolls by until it hits a snag… duh! didn’t I learn anything, I forgot to put the “noapic” parameter! By the way, I connected the laptop to my local network, thinking that there is *no way* Ubuntu will be able to detect let alone automatically install drivers for the internal wireless adapter (more detail on this in the “Hardware” section below).
Another thing that I notice about Ubuntu installation, I did not experience file copy errors that I usually see when installing Knoppix. Before you guys say “it’s your cd-burner, dude!,” may I point out that I use the same one to burn the Ubuntu disc.
Since you guys can read the numerous Ubuntu installation experiences, (you can’t throw a stone without hitting one of them Ubuntu reviews these days) I won’t belabor on the installation process itself. Suffice to say that it’s pretty uneventful (I like it that way), Ubuntu detects automatically the network cards (both the wired and the wireless), the sound card, touchpad (even the turn-on/off button works), the only abnormality is the laptop’s unusual resolution (1280×768), Ubuntu does support 1280×800 (ouch!). Thanks to the info in this review, I was able to tweak the XF86Config-4 and Hello… native resolution!
Lesson learned:
– Advantage from Knoppix: no file copy error when installing (same CDROM burner)
– Unusual video resolution requires a custom entry in the XF86Config-4
Hardware Experience:
Allright, let’s go through the list of hardware on the laptop:
Battery life – check, Ubuntu automatically provided an applet that shows the percentage of battery life. Very cool!
Power Management – uncheck, although the battery has the same duration regardless on Windows or on Linux, I notice that the Fn-F5 combo that is supposed to trigger hibernation doesn’t work in Linux.
Scanner – check, XSane is a “sane” scanning program, it even has a built in OCR feature. Awesome!
USB Drive – check, the usb-drive is automatically mounted on the Ubuntu desktop. As expected, good job!
Wireless network adapter – almost-check, Ubuntu detects and installs the correct kernel module driver for the laptop’s internal wi-fi adapter. It also provided an applet to show the connection strength (quite impressive!) However, I have to create a script that actually gets a dynamic ip address from my dhcp server:
#!/bin/sh
# replace BLINGBLING with your wireless network’s name
# replace ENCKEY with your encryption key
iwconfig eth1 essid BLINGBLING key ENCKEY
ifconfig eth1 up
dhclient eth1
Although it seems like a bother at first, I kinda grew to like it this way, it’s convenient to be able to activate and deactivate the adapter. More on wireless experience below in the “Application” section.
Touchpad – almost-check, although it works overall (even the special region for vertical scrolling), tapping on the touchpad acts like middle-click, not left-click as expected. I installed a nifty front end to the Synaptics driver called “qsynaptics” but still it doesn’t help (the program reported the correct mapping to left-click, but it’s still behaving like a middle-click).
Printer – check, I was able to connect and use the network printers at the office (HP LaserJet 6) and a Brother HL-1440 at home. Impressive!
Firewire – unknown, I don’t own a video camera nor external HD, thus I can’t test it
Speaker – check, the harman/kardon brand doesn’t dissapoint. The sound is good enough even for watching DVD’s. Not bad at all!
QuickPlay(TM) – check, this is a neat feature (unique to this laptop series, as far as I know) that allows you to watch DVD or listen to music without booting into Windows (or Ubuntu). This feature is undisturbed by my installing Ubuntu. NOTE: Ironically, it works by using linux in a small separate partition.
Application Experience:
Now, here’s the fun part, this is where we actually get our jobs done. I thought coming back to Gnome after so many years using KDE would be a “culture shock” for me, that wasn’t the case at all, I think the Gnome team has done a great job by sprinkling easy to access menus to the typical Desktop and System configurations. This makes the transition really painless for me. In addition, I love how Gnome handles compressed files, it offers to open downloaded compressed-files in nautilus so I don’t have to put it in a temp directory and delete it later. Nautilus also provides a context menu for creating archives. What an improvement!
One thing that takes some getting used to is the Apple-style dialogs that is quite different from Windows Explorer-style on KDE. Also, I immediately set Nautilus to “always browse”, so it won’t open a separate windows everytime I go up and down the directory structure. I know that this is touted as the “spatial” feature, but I personally just can’t stand it. If I wanted a separate window, I’ll click it out of you, Capt. Nemo. (hehehe, got it? Nautilus… Captain Nemo… no? …ehm, forget it then). I also like the ability to type nautilus . on a terminal to pop up a Nautilus browser on the current directory. It’s one thing that I like in Windows (except of course you type explorer . instead of nautilus).
The usual suspects such as Firefox, OpenOffice, Evolution, Gimp, etc. all run as expected. No surprises there. On to the meat and potato (at least for developers like me) that is Software Development tools. My main weapon Python is installed by default, no problem expected, none sprung out. Next, how can I get Java? Traditionally Java is a bit of a pain to install due to the fact that it is not Open Source. However, thanks to Ubuntu’s community, installing Java on a debian system is easier than ever, just follow the instructions here. Soon I was able to download Eclipse 3.01 (see screenshot) and Tomcat 5.5 and be on my merry way to develop web-applications.
Next, installing Subversion and RapidSVN is also easy with Synaptic. I was also able to install a VPN client to connect to my office when I need to work from home (details below).
To satisfy my desktop publishing craving, (not really, I have been working on a white-paper for the PM methodology that I’ve developed) I am using Scribus. An excellent Open Source DTP (Desktop Publishing) program that outputs professional quality PDF files suitable for publications. One of the main requirement for DTP is the availability of quality fonts. Ubuntu is especially cool in this regard (even compared to Knoppix) because the MS Core fonts are installable using Synaptic and are automatically registered to the XFont server so they can be used immediately in programs like Scribus, OpenOffice, etc. As you can see from the screenshot, the wide-screen aspect ratio of this laptop makes it extremely convenient when working on two facing pages.
Another excellent program that I use in conjunction with Scribus is Inkscape. This is one of the easiest to pick up vector-based drawing program. It’s using the new SVG format that is based on XML. This results in an open file format where you can actually use a text editor to modify the graphics file. So let’s say if you change the spelling of your company from “Acme” to “Acne”, and you’ve spent 100 hours creating a very intricate logo using Inkscape, you can simply go to the file and replace every occurrence of “Acme” to “Acne” and your logo will be modified instantly, you don’t even have to startup Inkspace to correct it. How cool is that? Here’s a screenshot with a diagram that I’ve created for my project’s documentation:
One of my biggest dissapointment with Gnome is that there is still not an easy way to edit files located in a remote machine. Since that is what I mostly do at work, I need this capability badly. Fear not, KDE comes to the rescue. First I installed Kate (my editor of choice in Linux) and when I tried to open a remote file, I was told that “kio slaves” are not present. Hmm… could it be that “kio” stands for KDE I/O something? following this hunch, I typed in “kio” in Synaptic, and sure enough, I can install it separately from KDE and it allows me to open a remote file using the fish:// protocol in Kate.
Awesome! Big kudos to the KDE team on modularity! I hope this serves as an example to illustrate that the KDE vs Gnome “Mine DM is better than Thine” arguments are pure silliness. The main beauty of using Linux is the flexibility to choose what works for you, and sometimes the answer is to use both.
Here’s another shot of Gnome running KDE apps, with MC in the back, and Kate in front showing some Python code on the top view and this article on the bottom view.
NOTE: Another program that also allows me to traverse remote filesystems is the venerable Midnight Commander.
So far there is only one negative experience that I have. It seems to stem from a driver conflict or a bug in Gnome that causes a very frustrating behavior. Some applications (gnome, nautilus) but not the others (firefox, synaptic, kate) hangs for a long time (10-20 mins) before they come up, sometimes Gnome pops a message saying that the application has crashed and offered to report it as a bug, which I gladly did, however, bug-buddy (the bug reporting tool) hangs for a long time and it crashes too. This leads me to believe that the affected applications are deadlocking for a resource that has to do with either a working eth1 (wireless) or the non-working eth0 (wired) connection. I have reported this as a bug to the Gnome team, so far I haven’t heard anything from them.
Although you can argue that a problem with wireless will shoot down any reviews about Linux running on laptop nowadays, we need to keep in mind that built-in wireless hasn’t been around that long. We need to give time to the Linux developers (kernel, drivers, DM, distro, etc.) to work out the kinks. And I’m sure as it has been demonstrated consistently in the past, this problem will be resolved probably sooner than we think. I for that matter, am willing to wait.
These are several reasons that this problem doesn’t become a showstopper for me:
1. This only happens when I use the wireless network. It never happens when the laptop is wired to the network. Neither when the laptop is not connected at all.
2. This only happens to applications that I do not use regularly (except nautilus file browser)
3. I hope Ubuntu team take a note of this and will be able to fix this themselves (or help the Gnome team) in time for the next version (Hoary).
All Work and No Play Makes Us Dull Geeks, right? so I have to throw in some multimedia goodness into the mix. I love the Sound Juicer ripper that is installed by default by Ubuntu because it outputs .ogg by default and it does what it supposed to do without clutter and hassle. I settle down with Beep Media Player (BMP) to listen to music (.ogg files of course). For some occasional adrenaline rush, I was amazed that I can play Tuxracer on the supposedly very dinky Intel Extreme 3D Accelerator that comes with this laptop. As for DVD’s, I find myself using the QuickPlay feature quite a bit. And since it’s running on Linux, it just adds to the “coolness” factor.
NOTE: Lest you guys think I am a complete wimp, I *do* have a gaming rig at home, but that’s for another article.
Lesson learned:
– nautilus . (a’la explorer .)
– ms core font is installed automatically (better than Knoppix)
– Gnome cannot edit remote file (over ssh)
– KDE to the rescue
– Midnight Commander to the rescue
– negative experience with some Gnome “native” applications (gedit, nautilus) hanging when the wireless networking is active
– VPN Connection works after installing the “tun” loadable kernel module. I was able to install “vpnc” and connect to my office’s VPN server from home
– Rippin’ Sound Juicer CD ripper
Conclusion:
Linux has gone a long way from where it was just a few years ago in terms of laptop installations, ease of use, application choice, and maturity. I am but one of the living proofs that using Linux both professionally and personally is not only making sense but is also a joy. The breadth of applications that are available and their quality is a great testament to the Open Source movement which Linux has helped to pioneer. The fact that amazes me so much is how smooth the experience of installing and using Linux on a laptop. Despite some to-be-expected rough edges, it has exceeded all my expectation and I am actually proud to show my laptop to my Windows running colleagues and be able to debunk the myths that Linux is not useable on the desktop (let alone on a laptop).
About the author:
Will Gunadi is a Software Developer by trade and a certified geek at heart. When he’s not writing or tinkering with the latest Open Source software, you may spot him with his camera. Will lives with his wife and daughter in Dallas. His blog can be reached here
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
…so you’re saying that Linux now works the same on a laptop as it does on a desktop?
Haven’t other OSes had this feature for, like, years?
Yes, but this isn’t an article about “other OSes”. It’s an article about Linux.
I will agree with the author about linux on a laptop when he says its come a long way as compared to a few years ago. I don’t mean in the application sense, because over time most applications improve, so I think thats a moot point. I’m talking about installation and set up. I have an old laptop, 233mhz 92megs ram 16 bit NIC, and install slack on it. Back in the day I had to download the pcmcia-cs package through windows, then go into linux, mount the win partition, copy the file over, extract, recompile, install.
Nowadays that package comes with most distros, I’m not even sure if its still needed anymore with the 2.6 kernels. But when I install slack now, it pretty much just detects the network card and all is good. Sound takes some reconfiguring, but it could be the hardware on the laptop, but it does work once its configured.
So yeah, I agree, setting up linux on the laptop has improved quite a bit from what I seen.
I’m lucky….SuSe has gone on my laptop perfectly, unlike Windows XP, which needed some special drivers to make everything work. Install, boot-up, and go. Even the WinModem works (SuSE provided drivers installed on installation)…..
Not bad….
> Next, how can I get Java? Traditionally Java is a bit of a
> pain to install due to the fact that it is not Open Source.
mmm, no it’s only a matter of debian’s policies…
So if Ubuntu can’t install Java “directly” from their packages repository, such as Debian, please, pardon my ignorance, tell me why I should use it instead of Debian.
I dual boot my Dell 600m with XP and SuSE 9.2, although just this weekend I tried the Kubuntu Hoary. They both installed and operate flawlessly, save the Broadcom wireless (something that ndiswrapper solves quite nicely).
Overall, I have to admit that I was tempted to try Kubuntu with all the fanfare as of late. But Suse has won my heart. I will leave Hoary on board until Suse 9.3 comes out then my distro swapping days are over. I’m locked and loaded with Suse on the laptop.
Thanks for your perspective. Great article.
To edit remote files, open Nautilus, from file menu select ‘Connect to Server’ and fill in the details about your SSH/FTP/Samba/WebDAV server and save. An icon to browse this should appear on the destop and can be used indefinitly from then on (even after reboot). To edit, just drag and drop files to to GEdit for instance.
“…so you’re saying that Linux now works the same on a laptop as it does on a desktop?
Haven’t other OSes had this feature for, like, years? ”
But laptop not everyone has the luxary such as I of owning a
whitebook which come w/ out an OS installed. If anyone, Dell should be selling their laptops w/ the choice of not having an OS installed, even if they feel like still charging the user for half of the price of the windows software along w/ the hardware.
And hardware compatibility is not a “feature”… It’s a sad fact that vendors are lazy.
Thanks for the great article. Looking forward to giving Ubuntu a try myself this weekend.
Nice article,although not for me but i think it’s usefull for a lot of people.
After drooling over the IBM Thinkpad T41p for months, I decided that I’ve got to have one someday. Unfortunately that day is not today, the *$1000 extra price tag*
What’s so cool about an IBM thinkpad? For the exra prize tag i allmost have an Acer AMD64 3400+ 512Mb FX5700 laptop.
(or renumeration) recommend http://www.emperorlinux.com/
for your linux laptop requirements. Broad hardware selection, great customer service, expert technical depth. (Lincoln rolls his own kernel patches for extra goodness).
Perfectly capable of configuring all your hardware, dual boot, and distribution tastes for you.
Sometimes, you do get what you pay for.
What about WLAN, TV-Out, software suspend (“sleep”), and connecting an external monitor?
We need better wireless card support.
apps that will Zero Config Wireless
“A”
What about WLAN, TV-Out, software suspend (“sleep”), and connecting an external monitor?
At least if you buy a Thinkpad with the above features, you’ll have it all working under Linux.
you could try /etc/network/interfaces instead of your script
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid foo
wireless-key BAR
The article title ironically is:Linux on A Laptop: A *Tinkerer’s Journal*
It might very well be that your power management works just fine and only expects you to assign a key combination (which isn’t there by default, because it’s custom on virtually every brand).
Just open GNOME’s “Keyboard Shortcuts” (not sure, mine is German) preferences applet, and assign shortcuts for every action you desire.
And, as was already pointed out, Nautilus can edit remote files just fine. In fact, I like the Nautilus way more than KDE’s and I also like spatial mode, but maybe that’s jsut because I’m accustomed to it.
Finally something really nice – a review without talking all the time about installation and the programs that come with the distro. Instead something useful – well done
I have been using Linux as my only OS on my Dell Inspiron 8000 for going on 3 years now. I have been able to do every thing I need development wise and school wise. I originally ran enlightenment r15 then I moved to kde and then to Gnome. Now I currently am running the cvs version of enlightenment r17. I don’t see the difference really between using my laptop and verse’s my desktop the only thing that I see that is a difference is the batter monitoring and wireless connection. I definitely recommend people to run Linux on their laptop. The only down side I see is if people want to dual boot they don’t have the option of having a bigger hard drive easily. The featurs he was mentioning in Ubuntu are already included in Gnome so I really don’t see what the difference is between the destroys besides user preference. I personally enjoy using Gentoo because of the speed increase I get because of compiling every thing for my system.
>> If anyone, Dell should be selling their laptops w/ the choice of not having an OS installed,
that would be insane. Have you seen all the proprietary buttons on Dell laptops? Ever tried to get power management and cpu throttling to run in Linux on Dell laptops? I have on my Inspiron 5150 and its an impossible hair pulling out experience. Big OEMs like Dell get Windows dirt cheap anyway from MSFT so if you want to not use half of your laptops features just banish MSFT off the drive yourself.
What’s needed for laptops to be successful with Linux is for a laptop to be made FOR linux instead of converting wintel ones.
1) Build them so power management & cpu throttling works
2) build a little volume knob instead of buttons since buttons require drivers which Linux lacks. Same with brightness, suspend, cd eject etc… make those os agnostic.
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/entry.html
If you go into your kernel and manual config it you can get cpu throttling working on Dell Laptops Perfectly fine. Also their are kernel modules to fix the power management.
If you really want to use Linux you are going to have to manually config some things.
All of the stuff you mentioned above can be done in linux just do a little reserch.
It is great to see an article that encourages use of a mixed KDE / GNOME environment. There are many GTK apps (like the GIMP), KDE/Qt apps (like Scribus, KDevelop), or independent apps (Firefox, OpenOffice) that you can mix together to make the perfect linux environment for _you_.
It is simply stupid (like UserLinux did) to exclude best of breed linux apps just because they use the “wrong” toolkit. In Ubuntu, even if these apps are not installed by default, they are supported in main, and just an apt get away.
In time, the basic foundation of both desktops will be gradually the same, thanks to the freedesktop efforts. And people won’t even notice the difference between the toolkits.
Just yesterday I was working on a fairly new laptop that I thought had a hardware problem. So I grab my Damn Small Linux business card CD I had in my wallet, thinking it was worth a shot. The Knoppix-based hardware detection on it is wonderful… detected everything, even (thankfully) the integrated ethernet. And yes, this laptop had os-independent brightness, cd eject buttons.
In all my 2.3ish years of using linux (on well over 20 machines I’d say) I have once had to compile my own kernel or touch a kernel config. It was because the geniuses at ASL didn’t bother to put in all the orinico modules when they built the kernel for their LAPTOPS. Oy, I couldn’t believe that, but some linux vendors like to do strange things like this.
Most generic kernel builds will do most anything with modules; but occasionally a recompile is necessary for some feature. I wouldn’t expect to recompile a kernel. But actually, it really is quite easy.. And when doing it on a fresh install, no matter how green and scared you are, you really have nothing to lose
. (So do it right away if you need to).
Do you know where I can get blank business card cd’s? I really want some!
the Author makes to many excuses to love his linux laptop.
stick with Xp dude.
cpu intensive applications such as […], web design, etc.
Yeah, nothing but raw CPU power is needed to create contemporary websites.
the Author makes to many excuses to love his linux laptop.
stick with Xp dude.
I realize you are just being a troll, but I felt the need to respond:
Why? Why should he/she settle for an OS that doesn’t suit them? I personally dual-boot my Dell Inspiron 1000 with Windows XP and Debian Testing. I spend the majority of my time in Debian, but ocasionally boot into XP to do something for work. I find Linux does pretty much everything I need it to do, and actually prefer it to Windows.
The whole idea of freedom, as it relates to software, is that it gives the users freedom to use the software they want, the way they want. For those of you out there that prefer Windows, good on you, enjoy it. For those that prefer OSX, same thing. Don’t look down your noses at those of us that like Linux or one of the BDS’s, because that’s what we prefer.
@Cosmo
I have been owning a T41p for over half a year now.
Great mashine except if it comes to…
– suspend: ATI (FireGL Mobility T2) driver(?) f**ks up the whole box after resume.
– external monitor: unreliable and only in ascii mode
– tv-out: never tested
I’m tired of fiddling about. Any links?
Well, there is a good linux distribution called Conectiva. It uses apt as package manager and i think it better than other linux flavor. Some of you who wants to know a new linux flavor i recommend to try this. Using Conectiva Linux 10 you´ll experience a new way to use linux, little people know it, but i guarantee that some of you´ll like it. I use in my notebook and it works fine.
For download:
http://www.conectiva.com.br
http://www.peteleonard.com/gentoo-t41p/
http://www.niemueller.de/wiki/?ThinkpadT41pWithFC3
http://www.linuxiens.net/howto/mdk10lap.html
http://vsharma.net/thinkpad-t41p-fedora-core1/
http://theorie.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~arwagner/computer/T41p/
http://priyadi.net/archives/2004/12/20/gentoo-linux-under-thinkpad-…
Hope one of them is helpful
.
I think this is probably one of the best comments I have seen in an article such as this. I am kind of a new commer to linux, as I’ve only been working with it for the past 5 years (ish). I’ve played with everything from IceWM and KDE to Gnome and Fluxbox… All of them have something unique that they bring to the table worth tinkering with. Just for example, both Gnome and KDE support remote access to file systems via their VFS and KIO interfaces (respectively). While I may be in gnome, I may make use of KDE’s kio as there are less issues with saving files back (as VFS has issues with this). But then again XFFM from XFCE4 seems to surpass all of them on SMB browsing simplicity… Here’s the great part of all this… That’s simply my likes and opinions… Just because I feel this way doesn’t mean that you can’t run fluxbox with kontact and epiphany. Let the beauty of linux, in it’s ability to have this flexibility, shine as opposed to turning it into a turf war. But I totally agree with the article writer in that cross dm apps and usage is the best way to go… then your not limiting yourself…
I am not sure , but you could try Ubuntu — i have read on the mailing list that a few ubuntu dev’s use Thinkpads. My X31 works pefect with the Hoary-RC (suspend ram/disk and ipw2100 ).
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryPMResults/view?searchterm=lapt…
-best
-greg
I’ve installed Linux on a number of Laptops recently though have generally used Mandrake. This article doesn’t actually focus so specifically on issues unique to laptops.
As far as Linux on laptops goes… APM seems to work pretty well all around, ACPI, on the other hand, is a fickle beast. It turns out that many hardware vendors have bugs in their ACPI implementations and include in their OEM Windows install work-arounds. Fat chance that will help you Linux users.
Most PCMCIA cards, USB, and Firewire devices seem to automagically configure themselves just fine and I’ve had less isues with hardware under Linux than WinXP at this point (I never actually check ahead of time what support the OS theoretically has for it; these days I expect all hardware to come with a working XP driver and that if there isn’t Linux support, someone’s working on it and I can use the interim driver). Case in point, I just got a D-Link G650 802.11a/b/g card that include XP drivers. Installing under XP was not smooth (some issues with XP’s ZeroConf implementation and the G650 driver fighting for control; ultimately it required configuration using the D-Link utility, but then switching to XP to manage the connection). Under Linux, I googled for a driver, found madwifi.org, and downloaded the driver. It took about 1/4th the time to install and get up an running.
Hibernate? That’s an ACPI/APM issue and also requires disk partitioning to setup (which this author might not have realized). So far, Linux can hibernate on most laptops, but not all. Under both Linux and Windows, the support can be flakey and varies depending on the model (my Wife’s Compaq Presario w/ WinXP SP2 can recover from hibernate about 80% of the time).
Battery life also depends. My experience is that if you can find a laptop where ACPI works under Linux, the battery life will generally be about 20-50% longer under Linux, depending on what you are doing (there are difference in the way the two operating systems handle caching of I/O and idling that account for the difference).
Other than that, I’ve never had issues with any features on a laptop (TV out, external displays, etc.) All seem to function as you’d expect. I’ve never tried a tablet PC, however, so I can’t comment on the touch-screen.
I’ve had access to older laptops for a while, and have tried a wide variety of distros on them. In the end I stuck with Debian Sarge with the new installer. I’m a relative newbie, and in very little time had my wireless with 128-bit encryption, dual boot etc. all working fine. I will say the new Progeny with the old RH installer is nice too though. Just my 2 cents. Debian is not nearly as complicated to install now as it was 1 year ago. Nice work guys…
Well written summery of your experiences — just one comment
I am not sure what user/kernel space software suspend i am using (Ubuntu RC 5.04/2.6.10) but it does not require a dedicated partition. I think it suspends to swap can someone else elaborate ?
-greg
> Hope one of them is helpful
No, sorry.
Won’t switch from ATI- to Xorg-driver
Need the OpenGL performance (glxgears @ ~2100+ FPS).
Suspend-or-hibernate-unloading-the-fglrx-module is almost useless while you have to shut down X and so on.
xvnc for external monitor – well
regards, jan
It’s nice buying a laptop with linux preinstalled. I can download xorg configs, kernel configs, and drivers from the place i bought it from (www.laclinux.com). the support saves a lot of time.. and, of course, i knew it would be linux compatible when i bought it. no research or guessing.
I do not have the link but i have heard the ATI/Linux message board is fairly active and responsive —
-best
-greg
thank’s for the hint.
“One of my biggest dissapointment with Gnome is that there is still not an easy way to edit files located in a remote machine.”
This is just wrong. Nautilus and gnome-vfs lets you do this right out of the box. Instead of fish:// use ssh://<whatever>, or ftp://, or blah blah blah.
I had a similar problem on my laptop on Arch Linux. It had to do with the local loopback network device being set up. At least KDE wont even load without the lo-device. You might not have it on when using your wireless.
Under KDE, I can access shortcuts to remote locations in all sorts of ways. I don’t just have to go through Konqueror. Is there a way, in GNOME apps (the save / open dialogs) to use remote locations? I can’t gleen that from previous posts.
Actually I had the very same issue with suspend to ram using the fglrx driver under Warty, but appearently it’s fixed in Hoary. At least I for one can suspend to ram just fine without the need for unloading the fglrx module.
I’m also able to use an external monitor without any problems.
>This is just wrong. Nautilus and gnome-vfs lets you do this >right out of the box. Instead of fish:// use ssh://<whatever>, or ftp://, or blah blah blah.
That’s what I tried first, but none works, nautilus pops up a box saying that “Nautilus can’t display ssh://bla bla bla”
That’s what I tried first, but none works, nautilus pops up a box saying that “Nautilus can’t display ssh://bla bla bla”
Well, it works flawlessly for me too.
I recently bought the Linspire laptop from Walmart.com. It worked ok but. I could NOT get registered for the free 45 day CNR account. I finally gave up and installed Simply Mepis. It installed flawlessly and even came up using the netgear ma111 usb wireless adaptor. And I was able to access my favorite programs from ‘apt-get’. The Walmart laptop works just fine and i only spent an hour loading Simply Mepis and 6 or 7 favorite programs… Linspire could be easy, but I didn’t have to register to use Simply Mepis… I am primarily a slackware user, but the Mepis livecd installer worked so well, I may never get around to trying Slackware..
..so you’re saying that Linux now works the same on a laptop as it does on a desktop?
Haven’t other OSes had this feature for, like, years?
“Other OSes” usually have access to manufacturer specifications too. It’s the difference between being dropped off in downtown NY city and being given a map to a specific location at the edge of town, and being dropped off and being told to “wander around until you find the place”.
To edit remote files, open Nautilus, from file menu select ‘Connect to Server’ and fill in the details about your SSH/FTP/Samba/WebDAV server and save. An icon to browse this should appear on the destop and can be used indefinitly from then on (even after reboot). To edit, just drag and drop files to to GEdit for instance.
This is fantastic for browsing. Unfortunately, Gedit can only open remote files read-only at the moment, and I believe that’s as good as app support gets right now. Don’t even think about trying vim. gVim tries to open remote files served by gnomevfs via sftp, but in every case I’ve tried it’s failed (no access to keyring, perhaps). And if vim can’t touch it, it’s not of much use to me. For now, it’s good enough to drag-n-drop from my ssh connection to my desktop, work there, and drag back when I’m done. It would be nice to get remote editing capabilities though.
For now, it’s good enough to drag-n-drop from my ssh connection to my desktop, work there, and drag back when I’m done. It would be nice to get remote editing capabilities though.
Do you desperately rely on using the mouse for editing with vim? Otherwise I’d suggest to log on to the remote machine via command-line ssh and use vim in the terminal.
Seriously, four pages to talk about putting Linux on a laptop. I put Xandros on mine two years ago, it installed in 20 minutes and EVERYTHING worked perfectly.
would like to inform the author that apt-get and synaptic are available for suse and work extremely well. somebody with less experience would read the article get the idea that these great tools are only available for debian based distros.
“We need better wireless card support.
apps that will Zero Config Wireless
“A””
If you’ve got a wireless network that can _possibly_ work without configuration (i.e., entering your encryption key), you’ve got a really insecure wireless network.
my department has standardized on LinuxCertified laptops. They have been stable and have pretty much everything working with Linux.
To cut things out in stone: Gnome is fully network-transparent through GVFS. If your Nautilus says it can’t display ssh://blahblah then there’s something wrong. GEdit can _not_ edit files through GVFS. This is design decision. If you want to edit remote files I propose using Bluefish or some other GVFS enabled editor. This works flawlessly for me
I just wanted to say I enjoyed your article. You gave me a chuckle this morning when I read it, which is a good thing. I’ll be sure to check your blog from time to time.
ubuntu works great on my G4 titanium powerbook. sleeps when i close the lid, graphics acceleration on my radion, brightness and volume keys work, wireless works. dvd writer works. its compact fast good screen and battery life.
it even looks good 🙂
On my old powerbook Lombard I found running OSX to be tedious on the machine. It only had 384mb of memory and a 20gb hard drive. Running at 400mhz most poeple expressed that OSX should of ran well on the machine; however my experiance was not as good as most. I chose to install Ubuntu Warty (later upgraded to hoary). It brought my old Powerbook back to life and ran far much more effecient than OSX. I ended up selling my powerbook, with Ubuntu installed, and have now purchased a Gateway P4 1.6ghz 450LX. When it arrived I removed Windows XP and installed Kubuntu. I love the KDE interface and Kubuntu works with every device in my Gateway laptop including DRI on my Radeon. I am very pleased with the performance of it on my Gateway and will probably not look at another distro. Thumbs up to the Ubuntu team!
Jim
“What’s needed for laptops to be successful with Linux is for a laptop to be made FOR linux instead of converting wintel ones.
1) Build them so power management & cpu throttling works
2) build a little volume knob instead of buttons since buttons require drivers which Linux lacks. Same with brightness, suspend, cd eject etc… make those os agnostic.”
The IBM Thinkpad I own running SUSE Linux v9.2 works with the volume buttons and throttles the CPU and screen intensity automatically between AC and battery.
f you’ve got a wireless network that can _possibly_ work without configuration (i.e., entering your encryption key), you’ve got a really insecure wireless network.
but i was really talking about getting that card up and going “out of the box”
i strongly believe in security for networks!
“A”