Submitted by “Deciding whether a particular computer is a good candidate for installing GNU/Linux can involve a nightmare of details about hardware compatibility. Nor is assembling a custom computer on which to run GNU/Linux any easier. In both cases, you need to evaluate video cards, sound cards, printers, scanners, digital camera, wireless cards, and mobile devices for compatibility with the operating system. Fortunately, help is available.”
this makes it sound harder then it really is. out of years of linux use i rarely come across things that dont work in linux. a few net/wireless cards can be finicky or non compliant, and i hear that x-fi still has no linux support. lexmark printers suck (in linux, in general, the choice is yurs). ive used lots of scanners and cameras in linux, basically anything that follows standards in its connection profile will work fine. the things that dont work are the 9.99$ specials that u shouldnt be buying to begin with.
The question of functioning hardware is most relevant for someone who is switching NOW to Linux and already has “inherited” hardware from Windows he wishes to use. If you are committed to use Linux then you actually *choose* all your hardware on a compatibility basis. Number of choices is also good enough.
I mostly stick with NVIDIA graphics, HP Laserjets, Canon inkjets, Atheros and Intel based wireless cards. I prefer to choose my hardware to be as widely compatible as possible. I run Linux and FreeBSD (and of course Windows compatibility is a non-issue). Most integrated sound cards and ethernets work. If you made a successful switch (and yes, this also depends on how well your existing Windows hardware worked with Linux) then you simply choose your next hardware to be compatible.
If you apply the exact same criteria to a switch to Vista, and compare apples with apples, then a switch to Linux is far easier and far less likely to run into a hardware driver issue.
Linux supports just about everything you can throw at it. Some cutting edge things really don’t work (the X-Fi).
There are a few sticking points – WiFi being the biggest one. That’s being ironed out. Remember how bad modems were?! God…The horror…
Then ethernet cards, which tended to be supported well, replaced most modems when we moved to broadband…And were able to do dist-upgrades without blinking
Again, buying quality components helps TREMENDOUSLY. This doesn’t always mean name brand, of course…Do a tiny bit of reading or forum browsing, and you’ll quickly be able to pick up on yes and no’s.
Nvidia drivers are better than ATI etc
In terms of support on Linux, the best drivers for video cards are actually the drivers for Intel video cards.
There is some rumour about that it may be possible soon to buy a standalone Intel video graphics card.
I find the biggest problem for switchers is not hardware compatibility but the amount of ram and processor speed to run a recent distro for their aging Windows 2000 laptop or Windows 98Se desktop.Article has merit but to the scrutinizing mind can be seen as a bit “trollish” nowadays.
Any of these will run fine on older hardware:
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1
http://damnsmalllinux.org/
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1
+ you up one.Agree with your post.But the average switcher I had experience with wont hear about these.Its the Ubuntu,Mandriva,Suse,Fedora etc they are hearing about.
Edited 2007-08-15 01:12
RAM is very cheap and KDE will run fine on any hardware that has 256 and above.
I have a P-II 400 Mhz and 384 MB of RAM and it works just fine for most things. Of course, you wouldn’t do video encoding on a machine of this nature, but for web reading, email, document writing, music listening, it’s just fine.
I recently bought a used laptop from a friend; he was running Ubuntu Studio 7.04 on it and was quite pleased with it. I tried it out myself and everything that I use on the laptop worked (the dial-up modem I never tried so I don’t know). The laptop is a Compaq Presario V2000 series — V2565US to be exact — and out-of-the-box everything but wireless worked great. Wireless with WPA was a simple fix found on the Ubuntu forums and was nothing more than adding a repository and installing a few packages.
3D video is excellent (ATI Radeon Xpress 200M), especially considering the past issues with ATI Radeon drivers under Linux. I haven’t tested any Windows games under Wine yet; World of Warcraft is fairly slow under Windows on this machine, even with 1.25GB of RAM, but it is comfortably playable. However, my past experience with WoW under Wine indicates that I would be looking at about a 40% framerate hit, which would push it to unacceptable. All of the native Linux 3D games and apps I tried worked fine of course, other than Doom 3 which was nearly unplayable on either OS. That game is very power hungry, especially on a video card that is essentially a Radeon X300 budget card in a laptop format.
This particular laptop has a LightScribe enabled DVD writer, which allows one to “burn” images on the label side of specially coated DVDs and CDs. Amazingly, the company behind LightScribe (Hewlett-Packard, the manufacturer of this laptop) supports all three major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. There is even an official Debian/Ubuntu package available.
Suspend and hibernate work flawlessly, though for some reason it takes about twice as long to hibernate in Linux compared to Windows XP. AMD’s PowerNow is rumored to be supported but I haven’t bothered to mess with it much since this machine stays plugged in most of the time anyway.
Overall I am more than pleased with my purchase. I have a lighweight but powerful widescreen laptop that, in nearly every aspect, performs in Linux as well as or better than in Windows.
Every single thing works…
…except the wireless.
Woe, how forlorn I art. I just have to wait till they get the Broadcom 4318 working (it’s “Unstable” at the moment).
But everything else works, lightscribe and all. Just…
…not…
…the most important feature. Yet.
I’ve never had a problem getting ndiswrapper to work. What makes it difficult for some is that when you search the ndiswrapper website for your drivers there may be *several* versions for a “BCM 4318”. It’s a pain in the neck (because of the way the site set up the list) but you have to search the list *carefully* for the right version. I’ve never had any instability issues on my Pavillion, but mine was a slightly different (and older) model than yours. It also used the 4318, but probably not the same version.
BTW, I found the IPW2200 (for the Intel wireless chipset) to be a pain in my a$$, but after much Googling and cursing I found out what I did wrong. I just wish they’d make it a little more obvious, LOL!
I find my 4318 to be quite stable on my Compaq Presario 2552US notebook with Ubuntu Feisty. Feisty is the first “just works” distro I have used for that card.
Well, I say “just works”. But you do need to install the fw-cutter whatever. But that is *all* you have to do. During the install, apt asks if you want to retrieve and install the firmware. Say “yes” and you’re done! Then just click on the NetWorkManager icon and select your network.
I just recently acquired a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 laptop which works quite fine overall, there’s just a few quirks..Like for example I can’t seem to find anywhere any information on how to get the SD card reader working under Linux if that is even possible at all. And the LCD display incorrectly reports it’s resolution as 968×768 (believe me, I checked the actual EDID data) so it takes some hacking to make nVidia drivers work at 1024×768..But well, this same issue happens under Windows and Linux, and only in Linux I can actually fix it! O_o I even managed to get suspend and hibernation working
Though what bothers me is that it takes so long to hibernate, and resuming from hibernation is about as fast as doing a normal boot..
Oh, about incompatibilities: I’ve got a HP Scanjet 2400 which isn’t supported under Linux at all, and my Canon Pixma iP2000 I’ve only managed to get working properly with the proprietary TurboPrint drivers…It sucks to have to shell out money for just drivers when you have already bought the hardware :/ (though Turboprint is quite good quality IMHO)
I have the same problem with my laptop (Asus z71v), in that I haven’t been able to get the SD Card reader to work. There is an experimental driver out there http://sourceforge.net/projects/sdricohcs/ Couldn’t get it to work on my laptop (though I haven’t tried in a while), but perhaps it’ll help you.
As far as printers and scanners go, I bought a all-in-one from HP and it works flawlessly. I’m kind of shocked that the HP Scanjet 2400 isn’t supported. The HP PSC printers are so cheap anymore, it’s almost sad to see that it’s less expensive to buy a new printer than it is to buy new ink cartridges!
I don’t think it’s an issue of whether or not hardware works. Linux is the most Plug and Play OS availible. I think it comes down to when you buy hardware you see on the box XP compatible or for Windows Vista. Even though these could be empty promises and have been for me in the past there’s still some assurance that the hardware will work with Windows. Very few instances will you see works with Linux. At the PCLinuxOS Hardware Database we’re trying our best to change that in the future. Right now we’re just a small project, but we’re trying to get enough hardware listed and enough hits to the page to eventually grow large enough to start to certify hardware and start a communication line between hardware vendors and hardware manufacturers so eventually you may see Works with Linux (or at least PCLinuxOS) more and more. I’m just one person using one distribution. So if you would like yo help and you use PCLinuxOS please submit your hardware to http://pclinuxoshwdb.com Thanks