Re: Which laptop for Linux.

On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:10:08 +0000, General Schvantzkoph wrote:

On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 06:02:04 -0800, wexfordpress wrote:

I need a laptop with the following specs: Will run Slackware or Debian
Linux
Will do screen zoom with <ctl><alt>+
Will work in wi fi mode under Linux. This is essential! Big screen.
Decent keyboard.
Given the above constraints, low price.

All replies appreciated.

John Culleton

Look for Intel WiFI, that will guarantee that it will work, if it's a
house brand of WiFI it's a Broadcom which is crap. Note: Dell's Ubuntu
Studio laptops have Broadcom WiFI so it doesn't work out of the box with
other distros. There is some sort of Broadcom support in the kernel now
but it requires some binary blob and I've heard that it doesn't work
very well. Intel is committed to Linux and all of their hardware has
true open source drivers.

I've just ordered an HP Dv5t, I'll let everyone know how I like it when
I get it. To make my decision I put Fedora 10 on a USB key and took it
around to Costco, Staples, Best Buy and Circuit City where I booted a
bunch of laptops to see how well they worked, here is what I found,

HPs were all perfect, in Staples they had a live WiFI network, F10 Live
automatically found and configured the WiFI.

Lenovo Sl500, couldn't boot from the USB key. The LED on the USB key
didn't light until it was in Vista. The BIOS didn't see the USB key
either. So Lenovo was out.

Dell XPS had a Dell WiFI which F10 didn't find. So Dell is out.

It's possible to buy a Dell XPS with Intel WiFI but not the Studio 15
which only has the Piece of *** Broadcom chip. Dell has also decided to
skip the Centrino II generation so their laptops are limited to 4G and
they are using the 65nm processors, the HPs will handle 8G and use the
45nm processors. Dell's big advantage over HP is that they offer Linux
on consumer laptops and they are doing a much better job of it lately
then they did in the past. HP offers FreeDOS on their business laptops
but those are much more expensive then the consumer laptops. The
business laptops don't offer disks larger than 250G which is another
strike against them. 8G capability was an absolute requirement for me so
HP or Lenovo were the only possibilities, Lenovo's bad BIOS put it out
of the running and the FreeDOS HPs were about $400 more expensive then
the consumer HPs so that led me to order the HP DV5T. Unfortunately that
means that I've paid for a useless copy of Vista which I'll have to
delete but there wasn't any alternative.

Here is my report on the HP DV5T. I got it with the following features,

Nvidia Graphics (includes gigabit ethernet)
Intel Wireless N
1650x1080 Infinity Display with Webcam
4G RAM
320G Drive
9400 Processor

The laptop is very fast and it handles heavy loads without a problem. The
Intel Wireless works perfectly under Fedora 10. The graphics is fine of
course and the gigabit NIC works fine. The web cam also works without a
hitch, I don't have any use for it but I tried it out just to see if it
works. The sound level is a little low but it works. Hibernate and
Suspend don't work, the disk doesn't respond when it wakes up.

The laptop came with 64 bit Vista Home Premium. It was (past tense, I've
deleted it) horrendous. Vista took 20 minutes to boot and it took over 3
hours to make the 3 recovery DVDs (I made them just in case I need to
return the laptop for service, I suspect that HP might insist that Vista
be there). I tried to resize the Vista partition with gparted on an
Fedora 10 Live USB stick, gparted couldn't resize it so I just deleted it
along with the Vista recovery partition. According to gparted there was
40G for the Vista partition and 12G for the recovery partition so I saved
over 50G by getting rid of it.
.