Linux on a laptop

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Ok, i'm interested in sticking linux on a lapton, but i'm just wondering which distro i should go for, i want one that contains power managment features and processor throttling for increased battery life

seanos

Hm, best way is really try few of bigger ones, and see what you like.

Fedora Core
Ubuntu
Suse

Are three biggest names, I'd prob give 'em a shot in that order.

EDIT: install laptop-mode packages for better battery life

Stephen

Ubuntu works very well on my intel centrino based laptop. The only drivers I had to install in addition to those it ships with were the nvidia 3d acceleration ones. WLAN, sound, ethernet etc all worked fine out of the box.
Battery life is slightly longer than I get using Windows XP.

Stark

Ubuntu is supposed to be very good for hardware support I've heard so it's a good one to try.

I'm not sure how good Suse is on a laptop, but it's a very nice distro these days in my opinion. (I used to hate it prior to 9.2).

Thomas_S_Hunterson

And do you know if Ubuntu comes with power managment features, for example, while on battery can it automatically conserve power and when plugged in, turn itself loose

Stephen

Yeah it does. When i run it on battery my cpu automatically throttles back to 800MHz from 1.73ghz, then speeds up if the load increases on it. I haven't actually found any way of configuring its power management behaviour, but i'd bet its just a package download away.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

sounds great, thanks a mil

Mach

Yeah Ubuntu, my Packard Bell(Sucks I know) works great with it ( well 5.10)

scojones

Lads, this question comes up so often, should we create a sticky about it?

niallb

A sticky with links to some of the previous discussions would be a great thing. Likewise a list of problems solved with particular hardware.
Maybe the dublug/dublinlug/ site would even be a good place to gather some of that info.

The feedback element of making a suggestion based on what each person is specifically looking for is what makes this different to a thousand websites.

For example, it seems to be the consensus opinion here that ubuntu is the ideal distribution for a new user - it's powerful and does a great job on hardware detection.

It's not suitable for everyone though, and many of the questions here have been about what might suit older hardware with limited memory.
A straight install of Ubuntu won't cut it on 128M of RAM.

NiallB

melekalikimaka

ubuntu isnt TOO bad on 128mb ram, i run it, its abit slow but works ok, its a little faster than xp but it does the job, i run it on a p 500

DerMon

Stephen wrote:

I haven't actually found any way of configuring its power management behaviour, but i'd bet its just a package download away.

I'm running kubuntu on a laptop and the power management feature is available through system settings, reckon it's there on ubuntu too, you probably just need to hunt around.

Stephen

Just noticed a glaring omission from ubuntu for laptop users: No WPA support for wifi. You can painfully hack it in using a lot of messing about but you can't configure it using the GUI and if you move from wlan to wlan you're shagged.
I only noticed this last night - got a new router in the house that supports WPA, and all my wifi devices support WPA too so I configured the router to use WPA for increased security, only to find I couldn't get it working with ubuntu

WEP works fine and is easy to configure etc from gnome.

I hope this is something they fix in Dapper.

jaqian

niallb wrote:

A sticky with links to some of the previous discussions would be a great thing. Likewise a list of problems solved with particular hardware.
Maybe the dublug/dublinlug/ site would even be a good place to gather some of that info.

NiallB

If someone gathers the info I'll stick it up on the site. Any other info ppl would like to see on the site?

Cormic

I would agree with Ubuntu as well. Ran on my Dell Latitude d600 without any messing about with drivers.

Goodshape

I'm using Kubuntu on my Compaq Presario and it runs great. Have never been able to get wifi cards working with it though, which is fairly annoying and one of the few things which would have me booting back to windows on occasion.

jaqian

openSUSE 10 runs great on a laptop its what I'm using at the moment.

Stephen

Jaqian: Any idea if it supports WPA without having to go fooling about with wpasupplicant and that kind of thing?

henbane

Stephen wrote:

Jaqian: Any idea if it supports WPA without having to go fooling about with wpasupplicant and that kind of thing?

I just checked my install of suse10 and found options for wpa in the network card configuration. I've never tested it but the support is there within yast.

7aken

Im running suse 10 aswell and have had no prbs with it at all. dual boot system with win xp. one thing to note though is if you do a dual boot with xp its easier if you install xp first, then use something like pqmagic to make a partition for suse

jaqian

Stephen wrote:

Jaqian: Any idea if it supports WPA without having to go fooling about with wpasupplicant and that kind of thing?

Sorry never used it but henbane says its there.

scojones

Stephen, wpa_supplicant is not hard to get working. I wrote an ndiswrapper tutorial for Ubuntu users which was on my page on members.boards.ie but I think that died now. Anyway, I also included a section on getting wpa working. I'm just finishing off a thesis now but once that is done I will write the tutorial again. When it's done I'll post it here - end of the month. Infact, I'll probably write something like this every month or so from then on.

Stephen

sjones - i had a look through some wpa_supplicant stuff on ubuntu forums, but there seems to be no way of easily moving from wlan to wlan - you have to re-edit the config for each network as far as I can see?

I might stick Suse 10 on the laptop this evening and give it a whirl. I'm still pretty much experimenting and have a safe disk image of my ubuntu install if i want to restore it.

Stephen

Update: I've been running Suse 10 on the laptop for the last week and its been very good. WPA worked right off the bat. The only thing I had to tinker with was to tell it what size my screen (15.4" WXGA) is to get aspect ratio/fonts looking right.
Only one minor issue, and that is that when you resume after suspending the computer, DNS resolution seems to not work. A quick rcnetwork restart at the command line sorts it.
It even supports my laptop's hardware button for enabling/disabling the wireless card. Nice!

Mulla3rd

Hi Guys,

I have just set up Backtrack 3 to boot from a USB.
Unfortunately when i boot it up it does not find the wireless card in my laptop. Im very new to Linux so i haven't really much of an idea how to update the drivers in Backtrack.

I believe i found the right driver for it at

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download

But i have no idea how to update these when i start linux up.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what needs to be done?

An Fear Aniar

Sean_K wrote: »

And do you know if Ubuntu comes with power managment features, for example, while on battery can it automatically conserve power and when plugged in, turn itself loose

On that note, some, but not all laptops are affected by a bug in the Advanced Power Management system that controls the battery. This comes with the firmware or the BIOS.

What happens is that the APM is set too high and it causes the heads to park on the disk much too often. Most hard drives are designed to die after a certain number of parks (around 600,000). The effect of this APM setting is that the hard drive life-span is shortened to a few months.

See more about it here:
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug/

Most Windows OS's have a means of counteracting this - but Linux doesn't have a pre-built fix. There is an ad hoc fix for it and it's not difficult to do.

The bug is not caused by Linux but you need to be aware of it. If your hard drive is clicking loudly every few seconds it means the hard drive is dying and you need to install the fix.

Something to bear in mind.

.

generalmiaow

Mulla3rd wrote: »

Hi Guys,

I have just set up Backtrack 3 to boot from a USB.
Unfortunately when i boot it up it does not find the wireless card in my laptop. Im very new to Linux so i haven't really much of an idea how to update the drivers in Backtrack.

I believe i found the right driver for it at

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download

But i have no idea how to update these when i start linux up.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what needs to be done?

You should re-ask this question in a new thread as this is two years old
Also do mention what your WLAN card is and the model of your laptop.

Bear in mind that Backtrack has a very specialised kernel with some very experimental wireless drivers and if you are booting it "live" from a USB the changes you make won't persist when you reboot.