Advice for Linux on a Laptop?

Trillian_1138 is seeking your advice on the following: "So I'm looking at replacing my aging laptop. I have a desktop running Ubuntu, which I use as a primary, and it is more than adequate for my needs. However, I'd love a small, portable laptop to use in class and on trips. I've been looking at the MacBook Pros and, more recently, the MacBooks, and was almost ready to buy the low-end MacBook and be done with it. I liked its ability to dual-book to Windows for a couple of school-related programs, but the more I thought about it the more I like using Ubuntu at home and the less reason I saw to buy a Mac if I could use Ubuntu on a laptop. This brought me to the idea of buying a laptop to use as a dual-boot Linux/Window machine, either with Linux or Windows pre-installed, and setting up a dual-boot with the other OS. Might any of you have advice, anecdotes, success stories, horror stories, or general input?"

"Please note I am not looking for a discussion on whether Linux is 'Ready for the Desktop'. I switched over to Ubuntu earlier this year and haven't looked back. As far as I'm concerned, Linux is ready for *my* desktop, which is all I really care about. This laptop is for me, not my mom. I'm not a command-line guru by any means and likes having a nice GUI, but am comfortable Googling when my DVDs stop playing after an update or poking around in configuration files to get things working. What I'm now curious about is what to expect - positive and negative - with Linux on a laptop.

I know a quick Google search yields lots of information on laptops running Linux, and I am continuing to use Google to look at information on running Linux on laptops which came with Windows, buying OS-less laptops, and buying laptops with Linux pre-installed, but I'm curious what the Slashdot crowd thinks. Is it even worth the bother? Would I be better off buying a Dell and installing Linux or buying a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed from somewhere like system76.com or Linuxcertified.com?"

Advice

[WilyCoder (736280)]

Advice: MAKE SURE you get a wifi card compatible with linux. I got lucky with the intel 2200; at first it had no support, now its in the kernel :)

Re:Advice

[by Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much any wifi card is supported now, though. There are four main cards out there: Prism (supported in-kernel), Broadcom (an experimental driver exists that is constantly improving, and you can always use ndiswrapper), Atheros (madwifi driver), and Intel (supported in-kernel). The most popular is Broadcom, though. You are better off with an Intel card. The Broadcom driver was reverse engineered from the firmware of a Linksys router and the PowerPC driver, so the Intel drivers are better quality.

Re:Advice

[ryanov (193048)]

This is not so true. Cards based on Atheros, while "well-supported" can be flaky to say the least. Mine resets for no reason, the madwifi-ng driver seems to be in flux (and for me, doesn't work when installed), and has generally been a pain in the ass. Thankfully, this card is an eval from a co-worker.

Re:Advice

[Bert64 (520050)]

It seems to depend upon the cards too...
There are a large number of cards based on atheros chipsets, i have several myself...
My experience is that the d-link one (650G or something, i forget the model number, it has 802.11a disabled) is very flakey, while my cisco cards (also based on the same atheros chipset, but with 802.11a still enabled) work perfectly.

If you ever want to do anything "dodgy" with wireless, like sniffing or packet injection, atheros cards are the ones to go for and i would recommend the cisco ones.

Re:Advice

[ottothecow (600101)]

Just get a thinkpad.

IIRC they dont ship anything that has any problems with linux that arent easily fixed. Add to that the fact that they are just damn good laptops.

Re:ThinkPad, ThinkPad, ThinkPad

[thedave (79572)]

Oh, yeah. One more thing.

EmperorLinux [emperorlinux.com] specializes in configuring Linux laptops. And, they maintain a good stock of IBM's.

Their markup is a little high, but their support is excellent.

I haven't purchased from them, yet. But, I bought a support agreement and a depot install from them. I shipped them a latop, and they shipped it back with a fully configured Redhat. Very nice, very easy.

D.

PS - No, I do not work for them, and no they are not friends of mine.

hw

[goarilla (908067)]

avoid ati mobiles gpu's
if you need good 3d performance go for nvidia
if 3d gaming is not what you need go for intel integrated graphics as they
have released their drivers opensource iirc and it's in the kernel as we speak

Re:hw

[digitalride (767159)]

ATI has lagged behind nvidia for linux support in the past, but with the latest drivers that will be released with Dapper, the ATI mobile GPUs work perfectly. There is even a utility to scale back the clock on the GPU to save battery life at the expense of 3D performance. We found the MSI laptops with AMD 64-bit CPUS and ATI chipsets to be much better overall than the current Asus laptop offerings.
In desktops, we prefer nVidia cards, but the latest AMD-64 ATI mobile chipsets are clearly the best in our e

mandrake

[sumdumass (711423)]

I ran mandrake on an older sony vio (800mhZ) thru several releases including thier newest 2006 version without a problem. Everythign installed fine, Got my DVD's working easily and dual booted with windows XP 2000 and 98se. Actualy I had more problem getting 2000 and 98se (wich never was 100% because of drivers)

My sugestion, look for a laptop that isn't bleeding edge and maybe go for somehtign a year or so old. Use a current version of your brand of linux, and increase the memory as much as possible. Look at even getting a larger drive so you can make a plain fat32 partition that can be use form both XP and linux. I made the mistake of not doing this and then i was left with getting NTFS working in linux and installing a ext3 driver in windows. the 98 partition wasn't large enough to be effective in sharing files between operating systems.

Oh yea, Take a reletivly current bootable linux CD with you when your looking at the laptops. It should give you a decent idea of everything that would work or not. It make take some adjusting but if it works on the cd, you should be able to get it working on a local install. If somethign doesn't work, google around a bit, there maybe a fix that just wasn't included on the CD.

vmware

[yagu (721525)]

I've done many dual boot laptops, but the last laptop I bought I wasn't in the mood for jumping through all of the hoops (especially wireless drivers).

On a whim I downloaded the vmware virtual machine software, and in less than an hour had a fully functional full color, wireless working, all peripherals working, full Xserver resolution laptop. It was WONDERFUL. And worth every penny!

What started out as an experiment for another way yielded other unexpected benefits. Suddenly I could run a fully loaded linux in the vmware server, and communicate with it from XP! Suddenly what used to require two machines I was able to do on the one.

Some of the configuration required some good indepth linux knowledge and a few google visits. If you can tweak, it's worth the investment.

Good luck. (And feel free to send e-mail if you have specific questions, I'll gladly fill you in on some of the tweaks)

Re:vmware

[breadbot (147896)]

Yes, VMWare, a thousand times yes. All you need is enough memory to run both OSes. First, the bad news:

• Linux (which I am assuming will be the guest OS) will run more slowly than normal. The slowdown will depend on the software; more system calls will mean more slowdown. I've seen a 10% to 75% slowdown, but normally I would guess (without any real measurements) around 30%. But very usable.
• No native accelerated graphics in Linux. Still pretty fast, but I don't think you have a chance of getting a decent framerate in Half-Life.
• You'll want to suspend Linux before you suspend the laptop. VMWare doesn't play nicely (or it didn't when I last tried it a year ago) with sleep etc. But don't worry -- suspending a VMWare image is trivially easy and very quick.

Now, the good news:

• Both OSes at once! No dual-booting!
• No special Linux lappy configuration -- no wireless networking, no ACPI -- just plain vanilla drivers. SCSI, even :)
• Not just one but lots of Linuxes! You can run several machines. Your own network! For me that's nice, since I do a lot of integration projects, but it may not matter for you. You can start with a base config and clone it. Etc.
• Portability and backup -- your main machine will be virtual (your Linux VM image). Just back up the image (you can pause it, back it up, and unpause it without rebooting it) periodically and, if your shell machine (Windows) dies, which laptops are wont to do for a thousand reasons, you can migrate your Linux VM to a new host. Isn't there a Star Trek race like that in DS9?
• VMWare (at least one version) is free now. I use VMWare Workstation, which is $115 (academic), but that may not be necessary with the recent changes.
• Chicks! Ha ha, just kidding. I wouldn't know. I'm married, I use Linux (and Linux hosted on VMWare itself running under Linux), and my wife insists on staying with me anyway. So maybe it's true.

That's my suggestion. It may sound weird if you're used to a one-OS-at-a-time machine, but I swear, once you try it you'll never go back.

Re:vmware

[irc.goatse.cx troll (593289)]

You'd be even better off virtualizing it with something like CoLinux. Just boot the linux kernel inside windows and either run a vnc server in it to vnc to, or run an X server on windows and remote X to it from inside. Much speedier(and I assume less battery) than vmware.

Considerations:

[slashbob22 (918040)]

ACPI - For battery life (It's getting better, but there are some units which still have problems)
Wifi - Both card and encryption mechanism. (Again, this is getting better and WPA support is becomming well integrated)
Graphics - Mobile Nvidia usually has better support then ATI.
Function Keys - There is fairly good toshiba support for function keys, but it's always nice to have the LCD bright/dim, mouse lock, etc. work correctly.

ThinkPad T-series

[Noksagt (69097)]

A lot of elitists loved the IBM ThinkPad T-series (particularly those with a "p" after the model name). Even with Lenovo's recent purchase of them, the laptops have remained solid hardware for Linux. I have run both Ubuntu and Gentoo on them. See ThinkWiki [thinkwiki.org] for some good information on running Linux on the whole ThinkPad line.

There are other good notebooks which can often be just as good. Just figure out what hardware you want to run and how much you're willing to pay for it. If you are tech-savy, install it yourself (sadly, you'll probably have to pay the Windows tax (though you may find some bare notebooks, sales on a win32 laptop will often be cheaper than a notebook with no software)). If not, get it from LinuxCertified.

If you don't get something mainstream, be sure to try a LiveCD in it first & dig up as much dirt on it as possible.

IBM Certified Used.

[twitter (104583)]

Getting a laptop from IBM Certified Used [ibm.com] is supposed to be a good deal. They are in good shape and come with a warranty. Think pad service manuals are available as PDF files at no charge and are excellent. The system 76 deal looks good too, with a better chance of working the way you want than a Dell.

I've used Thinkpads since 1997 or so. They are well designed tanks. If you do a lot of text input, you will want the joystick mouse control. Touch pads, drive me bats now. Over the years, they have gotten a little less sturdy but they are still very good. My favorite is still a 600 [thinkwiki.org] for it's small size and reliability. My current model is a poorly kept T23 [thinkwiki.org], which I did not buy from Certified Used. Power management works flawlessly on all models, with some tweaking - usually as simple as turning off ACPI and using APM for sleep.

The only strenuous advice I have is to avoid "desktop replacement" pigs. All computers look "obsolete" in a few years. The small difference in performance between small, cute laptops does not justify the extra weight. You might think it does today, but two or three years from now, when clock speeds have doubled again, you won't. As an extreme example consider two 10 year old laptops, a 560 and a 380 thinkpad. Today, the 560, is still cute but a technically superior 380 [thinkwiki.org] is an ugly brick. At the time, the 380 was 50% faster and had twice the memory and a much better screen. The screen is still better, but the fan is loud, the case is huge, the 16MB of RAM is laughable and it's just too heavy. Unless your hands are unusually large, consider an X series.

Avoid high school castoffs and other poorly handled and maintained notebooks. Screws should be replaced every time because they depend on a nylon coating to work. When you take them out, you mess that coat up and things get loose. Really badly maintained models will have missing screws and broken structural parts. They are not reliable and you might have to boot them daily like a Windoze machine. Yes, that's the worst I've ever seen in a Thinkpad. Lesser computers might not boot at all after such bad treatment.

My Thoughts

[acidrain69 (632468)]

Buying a laptop with Linux installed on it is like buying a car with the engine already.... no wait. Buying a laptop pre-installed is like buying a house with the furniture already.... damn.

What I'm trying to say is, there's something about linux that just lends itself to a self-initiated install. You'll have an easier time of it if you have to go through the grunt work on your own. You'll know where things are, what you changed, and you get a better pick of distros than you will probably find pre-installed.

This coming from a Debian-addict. I haven't looked at Ubuntu yet. I go vanilla Debian and add what I need for the machine I am using. I also still use windows on the desktop, but all the servers I operate run Linux. I go for flexibility. Yeah, you could use Wine or VMware as someone already mentioned, but what else am I going to do with that Windows license that came with my laptop?

some random advice..

[Ruie (30480)]

For many years I have bought Dell notebooks - mostly due to the screen resolution which I was after, but also because they usually specified which chips were used.

Nowadays, if I was buying one, I would carefully look at the competition, as everyone has good screens and there are really only few actual manufacturers that make notebooks - everyone else just sells a branded solution (Dell included).

So, in no particular order:

• Intel has native wireless drivers - see ipw2100, ipw2200 and later projects on SourceForge. Recent kernels also have this code, though I prefer to just download a recent tarball.
• Check linux-laptops [linux-laptops.org] website in case someone else has purchased your notebook already, it has extensive listings.
• Again, for many years I insisted on ATI graphics - since 2d specs were available (at least under NDA) X was very likely to work quite well. Right now, the support for older chips (before Radeon 1xxx) is quite good, but, AFAIK, the documentation (even 2d !) for newer chips was not released yet. Thus either look at older Mobility chips or find out what is the situation with NVidia binary drivers.

  I have heard that Intel has open source drivers for some of their shared memory chipsets, so this might be a reasonable choice, especially with higher memory speeds being available.

  (My personal preference is to try to avoid binary drivers as these tend to break when upgrading compiler versions of glibc library. Don't know what I'll be doing in a few years when I start looking for a new notebook.)

• in my current notebook I opted not to get a BlueTooth module since I suspected it would not work with Linux. Since then I saw many BlueTooth drivers appear in the kernel so check this option.
• network cards have a good chance of working - try to find out the pci ids if you can.
• I found hard disk, usb, firewire and cdrom to work without problems in most notebooks I saw.
• Not linux related: I found that Dell overcharges on memory. I usually buy a notebook with the smallest amount possible and then get a new stick or two from Crucial.

Thinkpads, whoohoo.

[tachyonflow (539926)]

I've had great luck running Linux on Thinkpads. The models I've used over the years are: Thinkpad 600, Thinkpad R32, and (currently) Thinkpad T42. The R-series is the "cheap" line of Thinkpads, and I'd recommend paying the extra money for a T-series. My R32 was glitchy with suspend, even after sending it in for repairs.

The only real trouble area for me is being able to effectively use dual monitors (the laptop LCD + an external VGA). It's easy to set up dual monitors, but not so easy (not so possible?) to have your desktop be aware of when you disconnect the external VGA monitor (to, say, go to the coffee house) and know not to pop up new windows on the screen that's not there anymore. This is an area that Windows does a lot better in, and as far as I know this is an issue with running Linux on most laptops.

IBM has recently sold their Thinkpad line of laptops to Lenovo, and I'd be rather cautious about these new Lenovo-produced notebooks. Not because Lenovo is a Chinese company, but because it seems that in many acquisitions quality goes down as the new company discovers corners to cut. The Lenovo Thinkpads may be great for all I know, though.

Another poster commented negatively on Thinkpads and Linux, but I think he was looking at it from a "what OS to run on your notebook" point of view, and not a "what's the best notebook for Linux" point of view. If your work requires Linux, like mine does, I'd definitely look into a Thinkpad.

I'd be very interested in hearing about Linux compatibility with MacBook hardware. If Thinkpads start to suck, I'll probably take a serious look at MacBooks.

I've it easier

[jsse (254124)]

I boot it with Knoppix Live CD [knoppix.org]

Better yet, a live Knoppix DVD [softpedia.com].

Unless, of course, you're a perfectionist that you believe Linux must be installed natively, but I beg you try it and examine its features before judging it. There's no harm in trying.

And you'd find it surprisingly featureful.

I have two Dells

[kbielefe (606566)]

The last time I needed laptops, I shopped around for a while, and ended up buying two Dell Inspiron 1200s. It ended up the cheapest, even though I never even booted the windows partitions once before wiping them out. Battery life is about 2 hours, and could probably be more if I fooled around with power saving settings. Suspend to disk works great. The recommended wifi card works just fine with ndiswrapper. If I boot up away from my home network, then it automatically connects to the strongest access point. I use gentoo, but the Ubuntu live cd worked fine when I tried it on my laptop.

My previous linux laptop ran Mandrake until the hard drive crashed due to the sudden deceleration after a 6 foot drop. I ran it just fine with a Knoppix CD for over two years, until it stopped working piece by piece. The built in keyboard, touchpad, and battery all died one by one until I finally had to stop using it when the CD-ROM drive gave out. Call me stingy, but being able to run Linux on that laptop when I was a poor college student really saved me some money.

Basically, running Linux on a laptop is no different than on a desktop. Just be a little bit careful about checking hardware compatibility and you should have no problem. Enough people run the big names like Dells that finding help should be relatively easy.

Dual-boot Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 6000

[lanzek (948620)]

Here's where I'm at so far, and what I'm still working on

-Used PartitionMagic to create ext3, linuxswap, and fat32 partitions prior to ubuntu installation (get it OEM v.8.0 for $20 off PriceGrabber.com)

Out-of-the-box:
The screen brighten/dim function keys work
Touchpad works
Everything else, except what's noted in last section

Used info in the Ubuntu forums to set up the following
-fglrx driver for 3D acceleration with my ATI card
-wpa_supplicant for WPA encryption
-ipw driver for intel wireless

Future projects: (free-time dependent)
-built-in SD card reader does not work yet
-after installing the ATI driver, suspend-to-disk crashes on resume
-suspend-to-RAM crashes on resume 1/3 of time
-external monitor port doesn't work w/ projector

I'm really happy with it so far - the few remaining challenges will only give me an opportunity to learn Linux better.

advice

[itzdandy (183397)]

my advice is as follows. know that i have 4 laptops running linux and have been through just about every issue out there.

first,
avoid GPUs for power management. i have a radeon x1400 in one laptop but when i use accelerated drivers my power management doesn't work. if you want a laptop to just work get an inbuilt intel chipset. neither the ati or nvidia GPU have good power management in linux at this point.

know that your disk drive will be slow and choose packages and distros carefully based on the hardware specs. I use (k)ubuntu and am up-to-date with dapper6.06 and everything works very well on my dell 600m. suspend to ram works well and hibernate works well also, both with some tweeking.

wifi is quite easy now. many devices have inbuilt drivers in modern kernels or can use ndiswrapper and the windows drivers. configuring wireless networks has not gotten as easy as windows on all distros but in *ubuntu it is quite easy. 'network manager' programs makes it EASIER than windows in my opinion.

most newer laptops are linux compatible as far as the other hardware. i have 2 machines with memory card slots and they work well, also pcmcia devices work very well as long as the device is supported.

really, you should have no problems if you buy the right hardware.

i know that:
dell 600m
dell e1505
compaq m2000
emachines/averatek m5105

all work well. the m2000 does not like suspend to ram though.

good luck

laptops i have or had run ubuntu on

[pixel fairy (898)]

sony vaio u101 (discontinued, import)
everything works out of the box(even rare
things like suspend and temp sensor) hardware
feels like it was meant to run linux,
including things like 3d accel, screen
brightness (better control than windows)
temp sensor, etc. this is my main laptop.

apple ibook g4 1.25ghz
also runs ubuntu, power management works,
but its not as nice. 3d does work. mostly
run it in os x for when i need a mac at
work, i like the u101 better.

fujitsu p2120
runs fine, couldnt suspend then, probably
can now. everything else works, but that
transmeta chip is slow...

thinkpad A21p ran ubuntu fine, everything worked.

compaq m700 everything worked out of the box in
debian, so ubuntu should be no prob.

the only things to watch out for are acpi (make sure
it can suspend if you care about that) and the wifi card,
unless you want to use a pc-card slot. ubuntu is
good about hardware support.

usually laptops are easier than desktops to run nix on
or at least look up. look up linux laptop sellers and
linux friendly ones ( http://powernotebooks.com/ [powernotebooks.com]
http://www.emperorlinux.com/ [emperorlinux.com] etc) along with all the
sites dedicated to linux laptops. also good to check
bsd sites and see if anyone on #ubuntu is using / looking
at a laptop your interested in.

if you just need windows for a couple school apps,
you might want to use qemu or vmware(player and
server are free) qemus performance isnt bad with
virtualization, but you cant like watch movies
in it and stuff like with vmware. but anyway,
its pretty easy to manage a 3 gig win2k partition
and maybe a backup or two, or just run it in snap
shot mode with another virtual disk for data or
just using the included samba (both qemu and
vmware have this) on a host only network so
windows doesnt get exposed at all.

Re:The MacBook [Pro]

[kalidasa (577403)]

What distributions are there out there that can handle Apple Airport wireless out of the box? (Hell, or any wireless out of the box.)

Re:Yeah. Buy a Mac

[Sean Riordan (611520)]

Weird you should say that.

My Dell Latitude D600 is perfectly happy dual booting XP and Linux. Currently SuSE 10 and everything just works. Have had Ubuntu, Debian (Sarge and Etch), and Fedora on it at some point. Fedora works fine, but I didn't care for it. Ubuntu worked well but had issues with the Intel a/b/g card. Debian was great when it was great, a lot of work when it wasn't depending where I was in the sarge/sid the etch/sid cycle. Debian always hated my docking station as well. The current SuSE 10