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Which Laptop to buy?


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I bought a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo SI 18-48 and installed Mandriva 2007.1, dual booting with win xp mediacenter.

everything is working fine, except for the card reader (not working at all and I have no idea how to make it work).

I only had a bit of trouble to get the ATI card working with 3D, but I got it (and I am a total newbie, so everyone can get it!)!

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I recently purchased a Dell D620. It has the NV 110 M Quadro (GeForce Go 7300 I think) and the Intel 3945. Everything that I've tried works including suspend. I've not given the modem a shot. I had to download the Intel drivers for the NIC and my kernel. I'm running FC6 though, so that may ruin the fun of some of you.

 

Good luck,

 

Jon

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have a Thinkpad R60 which works well with both Mandriva One 2007 Spring and Ubuntu 7.04, Ati X1400 and Intel 3945 WLAN work out of the box (the WLAN configuration-tool on Mandriva is the best I have seen so far), Mandriva activated the Hardware-3D-Acceleration without any problems. ACPI seems not to work on Mandriva in Live-CD-Mode so far, tests with Knoppix were successfull, ACPI loaded, Frequency Scaling works, I had the same behaviour on my old Notebook, but after a full Mandriva installation ACPI, CPU Frequency Scaling and Suspend-to-Disk worked, so I do not think there will be big problems this time.

 

According to a test in a computer magazine (c't) earlier this year the R60 works well with Linux (they had tested it with OpenSuse).

 

I can really recommend the R60 if you look for a fast, silent, robust, reliable and linux-friendly Notebook for a decent price.

Edited by lavaeolus
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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

I understand the sentiment. But we are very pro-active here at getting things to work, so anything that does not seem to work will certainly turn into a thread about solving the problem! It is just the way we are. Besides, I have found that, while some stuff does not work, the problems encountered are not always the same for all users. Occasionally there is a piece of hardware that just won't work, but in time it seems somebody will figure it out, it gets posted to the net, and that's that!

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  • 4 weeks later...

Does anybody have an experience with Mandriva on a newer ThinkPad T61? According to ThinkWiki, users of Ubuntu/Debian have variuos kinds of trouble with them: resume from suspend does not work, the screen brightness cannot be adjusted (Nvidia), Wireless is flaky, Nvidia card drains too much power, sound does not work out of the box. Lenovo certifications for RHEL and SLED confirm that the laptop is not trouble free. I wonder if Mandriva experience is similar.

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Try it out and see coverup! Then you can make a website and submit it to linux-laptop.net. That page is seriously helpful in helping people decide what to do. Perhaps someone has already had the experience you're curious about and posted about it.

 

This is perhaps the most sporadically posted-in thread I've ever seen.

Edited by JonEberger
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Try it out and see coverup! Then you can make a website and submit it to linux-laptop.net. That page is seriously helpful in helping people decide what to do. Perhaps someone has already had the experience you're curious about and posted about it.

 

This is perhaps the most sporadically posted-in thread I've ever seen.

Yeah, at one point we were getting so many people asking which laptop they should buy that I thought it would be a good idea to pin this thread to deal with them all in the right place.

 

I guess it may not have been the best decision, in hindsight.

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  • 3 months later...

I have experience with a number of lap tops running a number of Linux distros. To my eyes Mandriva 2008 is the finest OS I've ever used, bar none. It runs on lap tops I had previously not been able to get so much as a boot slash on.

 

As for my personal equipment, Mandriva runs great on my old (P-III) Dell Inspiron C600. An atheros based Netgear PCMCIA wifi adapter works right out of the box.

 

But I have had a Dickens of a time with a Dell Vostro 1000. The problems are too numerous to list. One major brick is that there is no way to power on the built in wifi without running Windows. None, period. No amount of laboring over the problem will ever fix that.

 

ACPI is very unstable on the machine as well. On several occasions the machine would not boot without disabling it, then magically it would run fine with ACPI enabled again.

 

Every so often upon shut down the video becomes unreadable, randomly and out of the blue. When this happens, hold your breath: on a couple of these occasions I found myself reinstalling the system from scratch afterward. All manner of errors spewed on the next boot, which was of course not successful. I have never seen such errors, huge swaths of memory addresses with "trace" and "stack" thrown in.

 

This machine doesn't shut down all the way automatically by default, either. I had to add a kernel cheat code (apm=power-off) before it would shut down without hanging on an error about an unknown key being pressed.

 

In all, this is the most Linux UN friendly machine I have ever encountered. It seems to be designed as a whole-system equivalent of a "winmodem." It's stripped down to begin with, including BIOS, and all the reduced hardware functions (like a physical wifi button) have apparently been offloaded to the Windows OS. A month of searching, and trying suggested fixes yielded no fix to numerous of the problems this lap top throws at the Linux user.

 

It runs great under XP by the way...

 

But for Linux; if you want severe headache/heartbreak, and enjoy "losing it all" randomly and frequently, then the Vostro 1000 is for you!

 

I urgently stress Linux fans avoid this machine. Now that I have reinstalled it, spent a week tweaking it and learned what NOT to attempt to do with it, the 1.8 GHz AMD Athalon 64X2, 1 GB RAM and 160 GB HD are a fine combination. Using an additional USB wifi adapter is a bit of a pain, not to mention disappointment, but the 1280x800 display is stunning, very nice.

 

But it shouldn't be so dang hard getting here, including the compromises I discovered the hard way, like don't run NX on it! I'm left suggesting anything else.

 

I have heard from a least one fellow saying a Vostro 1500 runs fine. Easy for him to say: he has a physical switch on his on board wifi. I don't :wall:

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I'm actually glad someone posted about the Vostros. I've not heard ANYTHING about them except the 9000 fliers I get periodically in my mailbox from Dell touting these machines. Catworld, your comments are definitely noted.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Have a thinkpad as well. It looks like they actually MADE thinpads for Linux, though they won't tell you that.

 

I have to agree, as well. Currently running 2007.1 on a T30. Partitioned with the Mandy disk, installed XP on the first partition and took almost 2 hours to get all the drivers in. Switched disks back to 2007.1 and <35 minutes later EVERYTHING Hardware wise Works. urpmi the plf packages and 10 minutes later I'm watching a DVD movie. Most BORING Install I've ever done.

I tried Werewolf a couple of weeks ago and it had a few problems, seemed heavy and caused some issues. Loaded Sabayon 3.4 before that and it is Really solid and quick except that the ThinkKeys aren't working. I didn't even bother to dig into why as I'd already established this drive as my primary. I've been running Mandy since 8.1, been windows free since 2003 and have been more than pleased with their evolution.

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  • 1 year later...

I recently bought MSI GX620.

It works pretty well so far with Mandriva, I think.

 

It had a little weird hard drive partitioning. 50GB with Windows Vista files and almost empty NTFS 260GB partition. Which, actually, was kind of nice because I just let Windows use those 50gb and the rest used for Madriva.

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