Which distro do you run on your laptop? [Archive]

Rob Williams

06-19-2006, 02:24 AM

This forum seems kind of lonely, so let's get some conversations going. I currently run the same distro on my laptop as I do my desktop, that being Gentoo 2006.0. I used to run SuSE 9.0 until 10.0 and simply didn't work on my Dell Inspiron 5150. Overall though, Gentoo is obviously quite scalable, so I don't need half the junk SuSE throws in.

What does everyone else use?

shoegoo

06-19-2006, 02:41 AM

I run Gentoo on mine as well. When I first got the laptop I needed to patch the kernel etc to get sound and acpi working right and I found Gentoo to be the easiest for that. Now it works in all the distros that I have tried, but I have become very accustomed to Gentoo. Lately the time necessary to update that computer has become a little bit of an annoyance. I may switch to Ubuntu when Eft is released. For now Gentoo will stay on it though and I have no plans of taking Gentoo off my desktop any time soon.

Michael

06-19-2006, 09:06 AM

Currently: Fedora Core. Previously: Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo.

Shadewalker

06-19-2006, 02:11 PM

Running Slackware 10.2 on an old 450MHz laptop. The cdrom fails randomly and will stall during reading in longer periods, so I had to install the absolute minimum of the distro and fetch the rest of the packages through the network after the cd installation.

David

06-20-2006, 04:28 PM

I put Ubuntu and Fedora 4 on my T23 when I still had it.

cakey

06-21-2006, 06:19 PM

I'm running PClinuxOS on my Dell Latitude c610. Works great.

Michael

06-21-2006, 06:36 PM

Just ordered up a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 for Linux testing, plan on running Fedora Core 5 and Rawhide on the beast.

jebb

06-24-2006, 06:54 PM

First post :D
I use Ubuntu on an Acer Travelmate. Love it, especially since the Dapper upgrade. Everything just works, feels very polished.

Oddly enough, I don't really like using Ubuntu on my desktop PC. I'm running Arch right now, and quite enjoying it. I used to like Gentoo a lot though, until updating portage database began taking half an hour......

rrpalma

06-30-2006, 11:38 PM

We use SuSE at the office on various IBM & Lenovo ThinkPads (A21p, A31p, X31, X40). Recently got 2 X60 that we need to install SuSE 10 on them.

Tsiolkovsky

07-01-2006, 03:27 PM

I run Gentoo Linux on my HP Compaq nx6125 Turion 64 laptop. I also have Mandriva 2007 alpha installed to help testing it and reporting bugs.

arcturus

07-02-2006, 01:26 AM

Kubuntu 6.06 Dapper on a Opteron system.

PCLinuxOS on a Socket A.

1c3d0g

07-06-2006, 08:14 AM

...I don't have a notebook (yet), but when I do get one, I'll probably install Arch Linux on it. Right now I'm using Xubuntu on my desktop PC (Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM). :)

foxtseng

11-14-2006, 11:49 PM

Hello everyone,

I am a new Linux user, and trying to run Fedora6 on my Dell E1505, but encountered lots of problems. Thanks to the discussions on many Linux forums, especially Michael's replies here, I partially solved some problems. But my wireless adapter and ATI video card still have not been configured to work properly. Trying...

Michael

11-15-2006, 08:12 AM

What wireless adapter and video card are you using?

foxtseng

11-15-2006, 11:25 AM

What wireless adapter and video card are you using?
----

Hi Michael,

My wireless adapter is Intel 3945ABG, with my Duo CPU.
Video card is ATI Mobility X1400.

I tried some methods that solved others' problem. But obviously, there are still something wrong on my laptop.

I will post the detail on related thread(s). It would be nice if you could give me some hints.

Thank you!

Michael

11-15-2006, 11:33 AM

What problems are you having with the X1400? Create a new thread if you need help. For the Intel 3945ABG try the FreshRPMs repo or get the drivers from the SF page.

foxtseng

11-15-2006, 11:57 AM

What problems are you having with the X1400? Create a new thread if you need help. For the Intel 3945ABG try the FreshRPMs repo or get the drivers from the SF page.

I just posted the details in the thread here,

http://phoronix.net/forums/showthread.php?p=2341#post2341

Thanks.

MU_Engineer

12-05-2006, 12:56 AM

I run Gentoo 2006.1 x86 on my 4-year-old P4-M laptop. It originally came with Windows XP, but SP2 rendered my laptop unusable due to drivers BSODing the system every hour or so. I put SuSE 9.1 on there and stuck with SuSE until 10.1 came out and had the whole crudded-up package manager. I had tried Ubuntu briefly, but it didn't have hibernate support and the then-recent version's kernel had no swsusp2 patch. So I went and put Gentoo 2006.0 on both machines as Gentoo's supposedly the one that you can get anything to work on. The guys on my local LUG were right and I've been happily running Gentoo since then.

It seems a common thing for people here to run Gentoo on their laptops. Did you do it for speed, geek factor, or because you can tweak it? I did it for the tweaks I can ensure everything works like a charm. My CFLAGS are pretty weak (added -msse and -msse2; -msse3 on the desktop is about it) but my systems are rock solid.

Rob Williams

12-05-2006, 08:34 AM

It seems a common thing for people here to run Gentoo on their laptops.

That surprises me given the time it takes to compile. My laptop is just a little over two years old and recompiling takes quite a while :-D

Personally I chose Gentoo for the simple fact that's the only distro I really use. No other distro has grabbed my attention like it has. Love the customization and tweaking factor that comes with it.

MU_Engineer

12-05-2006, 12:40 PM

My laptop is twice as old as yours. If it didn't have any help from the desktop via distcc, it would honestly take 3-4 days to compile the base system, X, and KDE. With the desktop helping out, it takes roughly 1.5-2 days, dependent on how much stuff can use distcc.

Rob Williams

12-05-2006, 11:25 PM

MU_Engineer

12-05-2006, 11:30 PM

I hear you there. I think my main problem is I have only 512MB of ram... I am considering an upgrade. Been compiling stuff all day actually. It doesn't pay to go two months without doing an update, because you will wind up with like 200 things for updating :D

No, it does not pay to go that long. A week is about it before updates take a long time. 512MB RAM on a 32-bit box should be enough to compile most things, 1GB will certainly do well. I have the chipset's maximum of 1GB in my old 32-bit laptop and it is more than enough. My desktop has 2GB but is 64-bit and the most I've seen GCC use is about 1.2 GB.

Radon

12-07-2006, 02:32 PM

Michael

12-07-2006, 03:52 PM

The biggest mistake I made was going with an ATI graphics card, there is no current Linux support for the Radeon Xpress 1100 or Xorg 7.2.

The Radeon Xpress 1100 should work fine with the fglrx drivers and X.Org 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, and 7.1. OpenSuSE 10.2 adapted X11R72 quickly since it's not officially being released until December 11. Anyhow, you may not have to wait long for the 7.2 support...

MU_Engineer

12-08-2006, 12:30 PM

I run openSuSE 10.2 on this Acer Aspire 5104. The other 3 popular desktops I tried didn't utilise the 2'nd core of my Turion64 x2 CPU.

When I bought this laptop in August, this 1.8Ghz CPU was faster than any Core Duo CPU's Intel offered, not bad for 800 Euro. The rest of the specs are: 1GB RAM running in dual channel, 100GB 5400RPM HDD, Atheros wifi chipset utilising madwifi driver, 3 years international warranty.

The biggest mistake I made was going with an ATI graphics card, there is no current Linux support for the Radeon Xpress 1100 or Xorg 7.2.

SUSE has been historically a very good distribution, perhaps maybe for the last release (10.1) and its horribly mangled package manager. It would be a good match for a laptop as it has suspend2 compiled into the kernel and this allows for quick and painless suspend-to-disk out of the box.

What other distros did you run that did not recognize the second core of your Turion? I understand that many live CDs load a generic uniprocessor kernel, but if you've installed a distro, you should be able to pick and install a new kernel that is SMP aware. (If that fails, you can *alwasy* get the kernel source and compile it to include SMP support.)

The Radeon Xpress 1100 and Xorg 7.2 is supposedly supported in the latest ATi drivers. If you can't get the drivers to work, then you can always go into SaX and pick the generic "radeon" driver for your card and it will give you a working display. Otherwise, wait for the next version of the ATi drivers, which should undoubtedly have good support for Xorg 7.2.

Michael

12-08-2006, 12:54 PM

The Radeon Xpress 1100 and Xorg 7.2 is supposedly supported in the latest ATi drivers. If you can't get the drivers to work, then you can always go into SaX and pick the generic "radeon" driver for your card and it will give you a working display. Otherwise, wait for the next version of the ATi drivers, which should undoubtedly have good support for Xorg 7.2.

Negative. X.org 7.2 is not officially supported by X11R72 in 8.31.5. The "radeon" driver also doesn't support for the Radeon X1000 series, which the Xpress 1100 is technically in. As stated in my previous message, you may not have to wait long for the 7.2 support... ;)

MU_Engineer

12-09-2006, 12:35 AM

Negative. X.org 7.2 is not officially supported by X11R72 in 8.31.5. The "radeon" driver also doesn't support for the Radeon X1000 series, which the Xpress 1100 is technically in. As stated in my previous message, you may not have to wait long for the 7.2 support... ;)

Hmm, I did not know that the "radeon" driver didn't support the x1000 cars until I did a bit more looking. Apparently the x300/500/700/800 cards are the highest cards supported by it. My mistake.

Michael

12-09-2006, 09:43 AM

Hmm, I did not know that the "radeon" driver didn't support the x1000 cars until I did a bit more looking. Apparently the x300/500/700/800 cards are the highest cards supported by it. My mistake.

Correct, the open-source Radeon drivers only support up to the R300/400 series. The X1000 series is the only models not currently supported. David Airlie had written a 2D open-source display driver for the X1000 series, but ATI will not authorize him to release it.

jamdev12

12-19-2006, 04:23 AM

Michael

12-19-2006, 08:41 AM

New to the Linux scene.

Just started getting my laptop going with Gentoo and I ran into so many problems trying to tripple the amount of OS' on my laptop that I just settle for FC6 for gaming and learning some linux while I use FreeBSD for all my work. If I could I would certainly use FreeBSD for everything, but without support for fgl drivers on ATI card that is definitely out. Wish ATI would get their act straight on drivers for BSD but I understand it is a money issue.

Compal Laptop

2.0GHz Centrino; 1GB RAM; ATI RV350 9600/9700 Radeon 128MB; 80GB 5400RPM Samsung Drive; Wireless Intel 2950b/g; Dual OS: FC6 -- FreeBSD 6.2

Too bad that FreeBSD is still on X.Org 6.9. If they were able to use X.Org 7.1+ there would be great R200/R300 support for ATI cards. ATI at this time does not provide official FreeBSD driver support. However, I am not sure if you're aware or not but a community member is working on fglrx support for FreeBSD -- http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?t=37837

DoubleG

03-18-2007, 02:29 AM

I run Ubuntu 6.06LTS on my Averatec 3225HS. You have to set a couple of kernel arguments to get all the functionality (specifically, you have to set the framebuffer resolution and disable ACPI), but other than that it runs like a charm. It's one of my best Linux experiences to date, mostly from the sheer comfort and "just works"ness of it.

DanceMan

03-20-2007, 03:07 AM

Running Ubuntu (Breezy I think) in a dual boot on both a Compaq X1000 and Toshiba Satellite A10, but rarely using the Ubuntu side. Difficulty in getting Firefox upgraded a year ago pretty much killed it. Automatix didn't help.

Thund

04-16-2007, 10:43 AM

HP nc6000.

I multi-boot; the main distro being Debian testing. THe other partitions are OpenSUSE 10.x, SLES10, RHEL4 & 5, Oracle (un)breakable, and SLES9.

Since I work for a large company that does quite a lot of Linux support I need to have a variety available. I have zero gaming or multimedia requirements other than Beryl (and it works really well on this platform).

As for the actual laptop - aside from 2 nagging issues (the miniSD slot and wireless) the laptop is great. It has an absolutely GREAT keyboard.

The SD slot doesn't work under WinXP most of the time, so no LInux support is no big deal to me. The Wireless works, but the blue LED isn't a "real" indicator of anything other than if the kernel module is loaded - it doesn't turn off if you hit the wireless button on the laptop.

Veegeezee

06-09-2007, 07:29 AM

Debian Etch on a Thinkpad X41 Tablet.

bimbo

06-14-2007, 05:15 AM

Kubuntu 7.04 on Toshiba Portege M200 (Pentium M, ipw2200, GF5200Go). Works perfectly. If I have USB devices connected (or the notebook docked), I need to edit module unloading of usb related things for suspend to work, though.

tekmate

06-24-2007, 07:12 PM

I have a Dell M50 that I currently run Klikit Linux on and a Gateway 600yg2 that is still using Xandros 4 but I am going to switch once Klikit gets a bit more mature.

avsa242

06-25-2007, 09:29 PM

Gentoo Lin on a Compaq Presario V5000 (V5303NR)...MiniPCI WiFi is a Broadcom (strike 1...though being removable I suppose I could always get something else); ndiswrapper w/Windows driver works fantastically...though now the native Linux driver is becoming pretty usable. Integrated ATI XPress 200M video (strike 2)...swap between fglrx and the foss stuff, though find the latter to be usable for a lot of stuff (xv works better), just no GL games (except Descent 3...perfectly playable at 640x480).
My first and only notebook so despite those few things I love the thing.

King InuYasha

07-18-2007, 07:52 PM

On my Compaq Presario 2170US with Netgear WG511v2 card (Marvell chipset), I run Fedora 7. I have run Fedora on this laptop since Fedora Core 5, and I plan to continue to do so. With the exception of wifi, since I have to do a little work to integrate ndiswrapper into NetworkManager, the laptop works out-of-the-box except for TV-out, but that is a given due to the Macrovision stuff... This laptop has the ATI Radeon 9000 Mobility IGP, so I can use the FOSS driver for it, and use AIGLX. Media keys have been messed up over the years, so I have no idea whether its a software or a hardware problem that the keys don't work... Oh well, I use the Function keys instead, far more convenient. Fedora rules!

FillG

08-21-2007, 06:03 PM

Running Mandriva Linux Spring 2007 with Vista in dual boot. Hardware is HP Pavilon dv9000z with AMD 64bit dual core, 2Gb RAM, 120Gb harddrive, DVD R/W, webcam, media reader. Mandriva is using 2.6.17 kernel which is just a bit old. Needed ndiswrapper to get wireless working. Webcam does not work under 2.6.17 because newer uvcvideo needs 2.6.21 to compile. This is not a complaint against Mandriva or Linux in general. Just stating the gotchas. Otherwise,, I love this laptop.:)