Which distro do you run on your laptop?

[Rob Williams]

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

[MU_Engineer]

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

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]

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.

[Michael]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[Michael]

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