The Other New Budget Laptop For Linux Testing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Other New Budget Laptop For Linux Testing

With having returned the Toshiba Carrizo-powered laptop due to its faulty heatsink fan, I decided on a different laptop to pickup for some extra budget laptop benchmarks this holiday season...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Second-Broadwell-Budget-Laptop

[SoundAxis]

The ASUS F555LA-AB31 is a fantastic choice, I purchased one a couple months ago as it was the only laptop (non-chromebook) that cheap that had full 1080p that I could find. It does have a slightly cheap feel to it, however it runs extremely well. The only oddities that I noticed were there is 4GB of ram soldered to the board and a single SO-DIMM slot (max 12GB combined ram), and that you have to remove the keyboard to be able to replace the HDD.

[schmidtbag]

My gripe with Asus is they really suck up to Microsoft lately, at least for their Intel products. I've worked on a friend's Asus laptop that needed to be fixed and it was the first and only computer I've worked on (of hundreds) that couldn't boot to anything but it's built-in HDD. BIOS didn't allow me to override any settings, and hitting F12 during boot didn't see my other devices. I worked on another Intel laptop where it would randomly freeze in either Windows or Linux, but if you installed this Asus-specific driver (Windows-only) the freezing went away. So basically this laptop had a hardware design problem and they used a "duct-tape" solution involving software. Not to mention the drivers were a nightmare to work with on either OS.

I'm very interested to know how this AMD-based laptop works. I want to like Asus but their recent products just seem so linux-unfriendly.

[spiff]

Does this mean that you won't be getting a replacement Carrizo laptop? I (and most others with me) know how these Intel laptops work with Linux. It's the AMD comparison that makes this stuff interesting.

[Michael]

Does this mean that you won't be getting a replacement Carrizo laptop? I (and most others with me) know how these Intel laptops work with Linux. It's the AMD comparison that makes this stuff interesting.

Not at this time... Couldn't find a Carrizo laptop in the budget aside from that faulty Toshiba unit.

[Nille_kungen]

It's just 2 new intel laptops to test.
It feels like "Move along there's nothing to see here".

[dvanzo]

My gripe with Asus is they really suck up to Microsoft lately, at least for their Intel products. I've worked on a friend's Asus laptop that needed to be fixed and it was the first and only computer I've worked on (of hundreds) that couldn't boot to anything but it's built-in HDD. BIOS didn't allow me to override any settings, and hitting F12 during boot didn't see my other devices.

If this notebook came with W8, you should shut it down with the option to restart into maitenance mode (or something similar). This way you can accesos BIOS/Boot menu at startup... (http://www.howtogeek.com/126016/thre...-options-menu/)

[gukin]

It's a bummer that there isn't a usable Carrizo system but you've got your constraints and that's the way it is. I hope that Carrizo turns out well and Linux friendly. Good luck with your new systems.

[pipe13]

If this notebook came with W8, you should shut it down with the option to restart into maitenance mode (or something similar). This way you can access BIOS/Boot menu at startup... (http://www.howtogeek.com/126016/thre...-options-menu/)

Seriously. Win8 has as default a suspend-to-disk power-off mode that powers back up to where you left off very quickly. Very convenient for Windows, but you've got to turn it off if you want BIOS access.

I've a nice 17" HP Envy that came that way. Turning off fast-boot wasn't hard, and its UEFI works well with Linux, as does everything else.

[pipe13]

Edit: What was an interesting exercise was moving Window's page file from its position smack-dab in the middle of the HDD up to where I could create a few Linux root partitions and a large shared NTFS TrueCrypt drive. Win8 has its own disk encryption option that isn't for Linux. If I had to do it again, I'd just add a second drive and leave the original Win drive alone.