Linux Distro on Notebook

[jspsh]

I'm thinking about wiping out my notebook HDD and installing a linux distro on it

good or bad idea ?

 

[drag]

Well, I think it's a good idea. But then again I am a fanboy, windows sucks.

You can use most any distro you'd like too, but be sure to always obtain the newest version you can and keep it up to date.

Laptops can be tough for linux to support, though. Lots of wierd and propriatory hardware designed for specific models and their isn't a lot of assistance from the OEMs for getting information needed to get things working sometimes. So the laptop isn't my first choice for a computer to learn Linux on, but it can go down pretty well if you have one that has good support.

check out here

people have listings their for laptop by laptop make and model. Linux-laptop has links to people who outline what their experiances and what they had to do, if anything, to get the system to work the way they wanted it to. If you have a very common laptop, like a dell, then it should be very easy to get it running.

 

[drag]

Oh, ya. Noticed the poll...

you have a IBM T23. Nice laptop, should work great.
Sometimes wireless cards can be a pain, though. Sometimes not.
Check out Fedora Core3 or Ubuntu Linux.

 

[Wizkid]

I'm using Ubuntu on my T42... worked like a charm. I would suggest giving it a try on your T23. There isn't much in a T23 that should pose a problem, the NIC should be intel (supported) and video is SiS IIRC which should work as well.

 

[BahbRF]

I have Gentoo running in a 64-bit environment on my Emachines M6805. I even have wifi working, sleep states, and whole works running very nicely. 2004.1 was a PAIN, and I never got it working, but 2004.2 was a breeze. I haven't tried the new 2004.3 release, but I might just do that here in a few days.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I'd put OpenBSD on just about anything. Mac OS X is working fine for me at the moment now though.

 

[phisrow]

The fact that I'm writing this from a Thinkpad 570 running OpenBSD while waiting for Gentoo to finish compiling on the T42 sitting next to it is a pretty accurate guide to my opinion on the subject.

 

[eigen]

I have Fedora core 2 running on my IBM R32

 

[uOpt]

It should run fine if you are prepared to do driver fighting in these areas:
- wireless
- hardware 3D acceleration
- sound (unlikely with your IBM)
- power management (IBM has been careful to publish everything the Linux people so that they can make it right but you might have to download it extra)

If you do stuff like constantly changing ethernet cards be prepared to edit the startup scripts, they are often screwed up and create a dependincy problem. If you just keep the same hardware in all the time no problem.

 

[TonyRic]

You will not have any issues with a T23. I have a T21 that I gave to my son and it ran linux with no issues at all. Your only issue will be 802.11g if you run that. But, ndiswrapper will handle that.

 

[Nothinman]

If you do stuff like constantly changing ethernet cards be prepared to edit the startup scripts, they are often screwed up and create a dependincy problem. If you just keep the same hardware in all the time no problem.

Not true, in Linux the ethernet device is always eth0, so if he changes cards the configuration will remain the same. And with packages like laptop-net which do network autodetection and profile selection, it's much simpler than Windows.

I have Debian on my notebook and everything works; wireless, built-in ethernet, 3d acceleration, sound, usb, firewire, software suspend, etc.

 

[groovin]

vector linux is pretty trim.... you can trim down any linux distro as long as you put some time and thought into it, but vector does a nice job being that way out of the box... err... downloadable ISO.

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

If you do stuff like constantly changing ethernet cards be prepared to edit the startup scripts, they are often screwed up and create a dependincy problem. If you just keep the same hardware in all the time no problem.

Not true, in Linux the ethernet device is always eth0, so if he changes cards the configuration will remain the same. And with packages like laptop-net which do network autodetection and profile selection, it's much simpler than Windows.

I am talking about ethernet wire PCMCIA cards interchanged with wireless PCMCIA cards, switching between cards keeping the IP address, going to work and plug in a different model PCMCIA card.

Fedora Core 2 screwed some of this up. A coworker has it on his notebook and had to patch some of the ifconfig/dhclient stuff to make it work reliably. On my Redhat-8 I wiped out all the PCMCIA stuff but that's of course a thing of the past.

if you have just the same card in all the time it's fine.

 

[drag]

There is a problem with device ordering that is a pain in the rear for Linux stuff. Basicly it's first come first serve.

I have a joystick, Wacom pad, mouse, keyboard, and often camera all attatched to my linux box via a USB hub. With the modern event driven interface I can set all of that to work just fine.
/dev/event0 -- keyboard
/dev/event1 -- mouse
/dev/event2 -- joystick1
/dev/event3 -- joystick2
/dev/event4 -- joystick3 (joystick has 3 different digital thingies. throttle, up and down, left and right)
/dev/event5 -- wacom pad

This is fairly nice because it makes it easy to setup things for a whole host of devices. You have a generic interface that just dumps output to the file and then it's a simple thing to make a driver for it.

Now the only problem that happens is the numbering depends on the order that devices are detected, if I change the kernel or I don't happen to have a device plugged in at bootup sometimes the order of the numbers can change.

So all of a sudden my waccom tablet would completely fail to function, and I would have to edit /etc/X11/XF86Config to change the numbers around and restart X.

Now that's annoying, but it's not terrible. That's with Debian.

With Fedora Core2 I had a worse time becuase I had two network interfaces and if I had my PCMCIA card plugged in at bootup it would become eth0 and the on-board ethernet would become eth1. If I had waited till after bootup to plug in my PCMCIA card, then it would end up being eth1 and my on-board ethernet would be eth0.

Of course you can imagine how this would play havoc with setting up multiple networks for my wireless needs. Eventually I just disregarded the fedora stuff and used my own scripts. Fedora Core 3, now everything works fine.

Now another example of the problem is say if you had a 6 different printers setup thru USB that are used by different people in the office. Now you install a new kernel or don't have one of the printers turned on at boot time, then all your printers names have moved around.

Of course they are working on fixing this with various features and capabilities that udev, sysfs, dbus and HAL bring to the OS. Udev sets up a dynamic naming and numbering system for devices in a consistant and sane manner, sysfs exposes kernel interfaces in a well ordered and usefull way (for example it's now possible to write USB drivers that exist in userspace for simplier devices), HAL provides a abstraction layer for hardware and when that is combined with dbus it provides a framework that can be used to allow a user's programs to react and notify the user of configurations and such.

Fedora core3 incorporates beginning parts of hal and dbus... For instance now with my laptop using my camera is easy as cake. I plug it in, turn it on. Immediately I get a desktop notification that the OS has detected a USB Camera has been inserted, and it asks me if I want to sync my pictures with the pictures I already have on my computer. Pretty slick stuff.

 

[Nothinman]

I am talking about ethernet wire PCMCIA cards interchanged with wireless PCMCIA cards, switching between cards keeping the IP address, going to work and plug in a different model PCMCIA card.

Doesn't matter, generally you want your wireless and wired configurations to be different. Sadly some wifi cards show up as eth0 and some wlan0, mine shows up as wlan0 because I use the hostap driver so it all works out.

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I am talking about ethernet wire PCMCIA cards interchanged with wireless PCMCIA cards, switching between cards keeping the IP address, going to work and plug in a different model PCMCIA card.

Doesn't matter, generally you want your wireless and wired configurations to be different. Sadly some wifi cards show up as eth0 and some wlan0, mine shows up as wlan0 because I use the hostap driver so it all works out.

Well, for me it matter because I do want the same config.

You see I have several ssh connections open at any point in time and my notebook is usually on the wire.

Linux does, kernel-wise, suppport that you pop out the Ethernet PCMCIA card, put in the Wifi card and still have all your TCP connections alife. That's pretty cool, actually, I don't think FreeBSD can do that without messing with a whole virtual interface in front.

However, I have to hack the PCMCIA scripts and ifconfig scripts to get this right.

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: drag
There is a problem with device ordering that is a pain in the rear for Linux stuff. Basicly it's first come first serve.

Not only device ordering is a pain, the startup of software services and the order of software configuration of hardware devices is also subject to non-constant dependencies.

In some customer configurations you need to set up service A before B before C, but for another the order may be different and A might require a part set up by C but C is now longer dependent on B. So logically it works but the scripts don't cope.

The FreeBSD people were once discussing to replace the shell-driven /etc/rc with a `make` construct. The whole startup procedure of a computer is just a bunch of dependencies and you could encode all of them. Then, a required and possible reordering as above would be supported fully automatically.

Pretty cool actually, but the sticking points were that `make` as a concept is great but the particular syntax chosen sucks and that if you could not resolve the dependencies then it is very hard to present the user with useful diagnosis.

 

[Nothinman]

However, I have to hack the PCMCIA scripts and ifconfig scripts to get this right.

I can't imagine why. Why wouldn't you just setup eth0 and wlan0 the same and be done with it?

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

However, I have to hack the PCMCIA scripts and ifconfig scripts to get this right.

I can't imagine why. Why wouldn't you just setup eth0 and wlan0 the same and be done with it?

That won't work. A TCP connection is bound to the interface. So if you want your TCP connection to survive then you must have "eth0" as the name for both cards.

 

[Nothinman]

That won't work. A TCP connection is bound to the interface. So if you want your TCP connection to survive then you must have "eth0" as the name for both cards.

Not true, I swap interfaces with just ifconfig up,ifconfig down and all of my connections stay.