Linux on laptops

Yes, check the compatibility lists or ask around on the forum of your distro's choosing.

FWIW I personally have good experience with Ubuntu 6.06 on Dell laptops. I've also heared that Mandriva 2007 works well on a wide range of laptops as well. You could also try to buy a preinstalled system. Check LXer's database of Linux vendors. It has a laptop section too.

I have a Dell XPS and installed Ubuntu 6.06 and it works flawlessly. It found every single driver and installed everything with the exception of the 7800GTX video card, but that was a simple download and install.

If your distro of choice is Ubuntu, there is a list on the wiki. I'm not sure how up to date it is, but it might be of use.

HardwareSupportMachinesLaptops

How is Linux power management on laptops? Last I heard, Windows had Linux completely beaten in this aspect, though that was more than a year ago.

Make sure to check the Linux on Laptops site for any guides to the machine you have purchased. Different machines have better APM/ACPI support than others.

Quote:

Original post by Ravuya Make sure to check the Linux on Laptops site for any guides to the machine you have purchased. Different machines have better APM/ACPI support than others.

Yup that's the site I used when I had a pc laptop to try to find a distro that would run on it.
Your best bet would be to look at that site and find out which laptops/distros are actually up and running before you buy one.
If you buy a laptop and then try to get a distro to run smoothly on it you are going to be in world of pain.

p.s. One sure bet is to get nvidia graphics on laptop since that's worked for years.

my advice is to avoid Toshibas if you're looking to install linux, or at least make sure that it is fully supported through Toshiba's linux website. I am using a Toshiba a55s(who knows exactly what model though...there's about 4 different a55s's, and I have no way of knowing which I'm using) and the only linux that is supposed to be fully supported is Slackware linux, and it's supposed to be a pain in the butt to get everything working fully. maybe someone else on here has a Toshiba running linux fairly nicely though. personally, I'd love to buy a newer laptop that actually has Shader 2.0, or even 1.1 support, and maybe more than 40gb of disk space, but alas, I'm broke, and have no job, and can't find a job I like that will accept me since I'm still in high-school.

Also, a friend of mine purchased a very nice HP for about a $1200, and I think I've seen him use about three different linux distros, along with Windows Vista and XP, and all of them seem to run quite nicely.

so, just some advice.

-Wynter Woods(aka Zerotri)

Quote:

Original post by Valderman How is Linux power management on laptops? Last I heard, Windows had Linux completely beaten in this aspect, though that was more than a year ago.

Windows still does better, but the difference is not so great nowadays. It will depend on the laptop and how well Linux (and Windows) supports the particular hardware configuration. Linux will do a lot better on modern machines than on older machines with buggy power management hardware (where Windows still does fairly well, because they've found workarounds for the bugs or whatever).

Len Brown, et al., wrote a paper for the 2006 Ottawa Linux Symposium on the topic. In summary, on a Dell Inspiron 6400, Windows had around 15% better battery life.

My Dell Inspiron works well with Ubuntu. Suspend works great, boot times are faster than Windows, and I didn't have any issues getting sound, wireless, or 3d acceleration working.

Power management is improving, but it still has a ways to go. Suspend/sleep worked for me out of the box, as do most monitoring functions (CPU speed and battery, I'm not sure about temperatures and fans).

I can't use hibernate because I have more RAM than swap space (I need a bigger hard drive), and setting options for when to change state (when to shut down screen, hard drive, etc and when to run on reduced speed vs. full speed) are still easier under Linux than Windows.

Quote:

Original post by Valderman How is Linux power management on laptops? Last I heard, Windows had Linux completely beaten in this aspect, though that was more than a year ago.

I'm using the latest Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on a Intel 915GM based laptop, and power management works perfectly.

The only thing I have troubles with is getting the infrared port and the built in card-readers (SD cards etc) to work. The brand is scandinavian, more specifically its a Zepto Znote 4015.

Quote:

The only thing I have troubles with is getting the infrared port and the built in card-readers (SD cards etc) to work.

Could you point me to some good resources on using infrared with Ubuntu? The only reason I ever boot into Windows on my Dell D610 is to backup my Nokia through infrared.

Quote:

Does Linux work as good on laptops as on a desktop computer?

I have never had any problems what so ever running linux on my laptops.

Quote:

Are all those exotic laptop components supported by Linux?

Im supprised how fast the linux kernel add support for new hardware.
I have used linux on Fujitsu/Siemens laptops for a few years and linux (debian, gentoo) never had any problems detecting the hardware. You might have to compile your own kernel to get support, but thats something I would do anyway.

Quote:

How well do laptops support something like totally erasing your HD, partitioning it and installing Linux on it?

Hmm, I cant see why this should be a problem. I have done that several times myself.
(If that was a problem I would go back to the harware vendor and tell them that this laptop does not work)
The partitioning tools in linux has always been superior to windows. (big supprise :D)

Quote:

Is it even possible to buy a laptop with no Windows on it (don't want to waste money on that)?

Ive never seen a laptop without a logo on it saying "Hi! I have windows inside"

I have asked myself many of the same questions you ask, and so far the answer always turned out to be linux does better
We would probably never heared about linux in the first place if it wasnt ten times more stable, agile and extendable than windows.

Note that my experience is with Fujitsu/Siemens laptops only.

Quote:

Original post by zerotri my advice is to avoid Toshibas if you're looking to install linux

To be honest I figured Toshibas were quite Linux friendly. Although I haven't looked much at the newer ones. My old satellite runs better in Linux than it did in Windows. Although I guess it IS quite old, so should be supported quite well.

Hmm, I'd be wary of Debian based distros if you've got a SATA RAID setup like I do, in my laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M3438G).

With every Debian based distro I had, the root FS would scramble and be unaccessible... completely at random. Ubuntu did it, and SimplyMEPIS did it as well, albeit less often. I switched to VectorLinux (Slackware based), and it worked fine.

Problem is, all the distros I've had hang/stick temporarily on starting up the hotplug interface, and none of the fixes work. Also, SimplyMEPIS was the only one that actually worked my soundcard (Realtek ALC880) straight out of the box. I think I got it working on Ubuntu eventually, having followed almost literally hundreds of people with the identical problem i.e. Realtek sucks balls. Problem was, SimplyMEPIS couldn't do anything else properly, and eventually scrambled on me and died like Ubuntu did.

As for graphics, I've got a GeForce Go6800 256Mb PCI-E. It worked fine, but you needed to download the nVidia driver and perform a few bits of jiggery-pokery with stuff like xorg.conf (and said jiggery-pokery sometimes failed to work completely, it was a total lottery) until the resolution option for my display (1440x900) magically became available in the K Control Centre.

I've given up on Linux until I can slap together a nice desktop machine, with vaguely standard hardware. This laptop is a total joke as far as non-Windows is concerned (even though you can run any Windows install and not just the OEM one).

YMMV, but my Linux laptop experience was basically total cack.

It's pretty arbitrary. Many models work extremely well, others won't even boot without significant effort (Most lie somewhere in between).

Modern and/or weird hardware is generally the most annoying. In particular:

- Winmodems - most laptops have them. They're cack anyway, but if you *really* want to use a modem, you might have a hard time
- ATI graphics - most laptops have these too. Only fairly recently did ATI make a Linux driver which actually works vaguely correctly with power saving (still not perfect). Until recently, even shutting the lid on my laptop caused the screen to become unusable until the next reboot (thankfully, it now works)

Modern distros are trying to make things work better by default. I have an older version of Ubuntu on there, and a few things were slightly weird (all fixed now though).

Generally speaking more popular, slightly older laptops are the best, as they will have had the most testing with Linux and any work-arounds applied. So ideally, go for something like a Dell or IBM that is a couple of years old (the model, not necessarily the machine) (I'm not vouching for the robustness / quality of either of these, just their Linux-compatibility).

Mark

i have found that dell laptops work great with linux. my latitude C600 runs ubuntu better than windows and i noticed that the battery time difference was very insignificant. my other gateway solo had ubuntu on it and it ran really well also

but to be sure you should check the distro's compatibility lists

i have a Dell Inspiron B130 (or 1300, same thing apparently). i installed Ubuntu 6.10, i believe the sound worked right after install, getting it to use 1280x800 resolution was not a problem at all "sudo apt-get install 915resolution", wi-fi was a pain to get set up, mostly because the guides i was using left out steps. beryl works surprisingly well also(intel graphics). i haven't had a chance to test out mic / line in yet. but i'm definately enjoying it more than windows.

although i doubt it's the easiest laptop to get set up, at least everything works after a little configuration. too bad it's pretty old, they stopped selling them like a month after i bought mine :/