I’ve been running Linux since 1993 (kernel 0.99-pl13 if I remember correctly) on most of my workstations and servers. I’ve had my idiot-zealot phase (”nothing but Linux is good enough”), but fortunately have left that far behind me. Now I like teasing idiot-zealots with comments about that shareware Loonix thing.
So for the past few laptops, I’ve been running Windows XP, mostly because this Just Works(tm) on modern laptop hardware. Linux really didn’t cut it when compared to XP: yes, you could install it without too much trouble, but getting 100% out of your laptop (suspend/resume, good power management, full support for modern GPUs, etc) is a different story.
Because XP is getting more scary by the day (WGA things, licensing issues) and Vista promises to be even more scary (binding itself to your motherboard) and because I’ve been hearing many good things about Ubuntu Feisty (the soon-to-be-released 7.04), I decided to give this a shot on my HP NC8430 laptop (Core Duo 2GHz, ATI X1600, 2G RAM, etc.). Initially I was determined to do this like a “normal” user, i.e. no tweaking config files and especially no script writing. I wanted to see how far your average user could get with a state of the art Linux installation on a laptop.
Installation
This was quite impressive: I defragmented my NTFS filesystem, booted from the Ubuntu Feisty live CD and did the install. Without getting all cocky about it, the installer resized my NTFS partition, created a new EXT3 partition and installed itself. Colour me impressed.
General configuration
After the first boot, I was greeted with a VESA-driven x.org and an incorrect resolution. My laptop screen supports 1680 x 1050. The Gnome Preferences | Screen Resolution applet couldn’t go higher than 1280 x 1024. I had to break my first rule and edit the x.org configuration file to add the higher resolution. Why is this still necessary? A novice user shouldn’t need to have to do this!
I also installed the Ubuntu packaged fglrx ATI drivers with the Synaptic package management software, as I depend on good 3D graphics support for my work. The new Restricted Driver Manager helps one to complete this configuration in a user-friendly fashion.
By running “aticonfig –set-powerstate 1″, the GPU can be set to a lower-power mode, leading to a cooler-running laptop, meaning the fans don’t spin up as often. This command can be added to the gnome startup by adding it to System | Preferences | Sessions. With “aticonfig –lsp” one can query the available powerstates. One can only change the powerstate if a single display is active.
I removed “quiet” (but left “splash”) from the GRUB config for the default kernel in order to be able to see boot-up messages. These are helpful, especially when things take longer than they should.
Wireless networking support
This is the part that really impressed me: With Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), I had to jump through all kinds of very user-unfriendly hoops to connect to my WPA wireless network. Feisty Beta simply popped up a pretty dialog box showing me the detected wireless networks and prompted me for the network key when I selected my WPA access point. I was online… colour me even more impressed!
Power management
This is when my jaw dropped ever so slightly (I’ll get to the “critical” part of this look a bit later): I selected suspend to RAM, which the laptop promptly did. When I pressed the power button to resume, I expected the typical black-screen-crashed-laptop syndrome. Instead, my desktop came back and I could continue working. This is a quantum leap in user-friendly Linux!
However, I soon saw that at every third resume (on average) all my keyboards would be dead.
It turns out something similar to this bug applies to my laptop. By adding the necessary suspend/resume hooks as documented in the bug report (so that the i8042 module is removed before suspend and re-installed after resume), the problem seems to have been solved.
Often after resume, my laptop gets stuck in the text console. I have to switch manually to X with Alt-F7. Another suspend/resume glitch is that the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor gnome applet is stuck on 2GHz for my second core, although the core is running at half that most of the time. In general, things get a bit flaky after resume; often I need to restart X to get back to normal. I could potentially deal with this.
Another disappointing issue is the terrible battery life under Ubuntu Feisty. On Windows, I get more than 4 hours of battery life with average use (wireless network, web browsing, text editing). With Feisty, even after enabling LAPTOP_MODE in /etc/default/acpi-support and putting the GPU in low-power mode as explained above, I get only 2 hours and 40 minutes. This is almost a show stopper.
Out of the box ACPI monitoring support is well-done. With just a few clicks, I could various temperatures and fan speeds on my panel. See the panel at the top of the screen in the screenshot below:
This also shows the Deskbar applet in action.
Dynamic multi-monitor support SUCKS
My laptop has a docking station with an external LCD monitor, resolution 1280 x 1024. The laptop is 1680 x 1050, as I’ve mentioned. With Windows, (hot) docking / undocking always Just Works. It automatically activates the correct resolution without me having to configure anything. So whenever I resume, I have a working display.
Feisty does not quite get this yet. In fact, Feisty needs some serious clue-bat-based attention… When I dock or undock and then resume, I have no display, and no way of getting my display back, besides power-cycling the laptop at every dock / undock. I ended up writing this Python script and binding it to Alt-F5 (for example) so that I would always have a way of activating the next display in the list of connected displays. Oh jeez, even assigning an arbitrary shell command to a global hot key in Gnome is not straight-forward. You have to use gconf as explained on this page. You can query connected and enabled displays with “aticonfig –query-monitor” and activate any subset with “aticonfig –enable-monitor=name1,name2,…,nameN”.
Desktop effects with XGL and Beryl
Wobbly Windows, you know, these are immensely useful and result in a more productive computing experience. NOT!
They are really very nice though. Most of the desktop effects are more nice to look at than actually useful, except for one: The Exposé-like functionality, called “Scale” by Beryl, scales and fits all windows on the current screen so that one can select the window that one wants to select easily.
Because fglrx doesn’t support the XComposite extension, I could not install AIGLX (Ubuntu default) and had to go for XGL and Beryl. After following this guide and making sure to use the external Beryl package repository as explained here (the Ubuntu packages won’t work in this case, they don’t have XGL support), I got the whole shebang to work. MAN this is pretty! Check out the screenshot below for Scale in action (there are non-desktop-effect ways of doing this, e.g. kompose or skippy, but none of them are as slick as the desktop effects version):
As with most other things in Ubuntu, this functionality is not without its caveats. This is even more flaky with suspending and resuming: after resuming, logging out and in will give you a garbled display. I have to restart X at the GDM login screen to get XGL to work again. There are also some focus issues, especially with the Gnome Deskbar (very useful utility, by the way): pressing the hotkey activates the deskbar, but you can’t begin to type, as the current window still has the focus. I managed to fix this by setting the Beryl “Level of Focus Stealing Prevention” (under general settings) to None. Changing to a higher resolution with the “Display Resolution” applet whilst running XGL+Beryl, results in only part of the screen being usable.
Miscellaneous issues
- Palm Pilot synchronisation seems to work out of the box with my Tungsten C, but hangs forever on ToDo synchronisation. Seems it’s due to this bug.
- The built-in Texas Instruments SD card reader works out of the box, but does not automount like other removable media. This is either due to the fact that it’s not seen as removable, or that the driver forgets to assign its parent bus. See this mail thread. I ended up applying this workaround, involving adding rules to the udev system to pmount the SD card.
- Gimp doesn’t understand SMB: URIs, whereas the Gnome Image Viewer does, and gthumb pretends to but doesn’t.
Conclusion
All in all, I’m positive but not quite convinced yet. The Ubuntu people have done a marvellous job, but Feisty Beta (up to date as of 2007-04-10) doesn’t quite Just Work(tm) on the HP NC8430. I had to break my rule of editing config files or writing scripts more than once to get it to work to my satisfaction, and still there are problems that would make it difficult to work in Ubuntu full-time: the miserable battery life, the flaky suspend/resume and the really bad dynamic multi-monitor support. That being said, things like the user-friendly WPA support and the flawless install on an NTFS partition are going in the right direction.
Updates
- This post has been linked by OSNews! You can also follow some of the discussion over there.
- It’s also on digg (should I say that it’s been dugg?). See here.
- Fixed aticonfig lsp/lsb typo, thanks lampshade!
- My domain has been migrated to a more stable server, some comments may have been lost in the process. If your comment has not appeared yet, please re-submit it.
PS
Please comment away, but keep it civilised. I’ll update the post as we go along, and give credit where credit’s due.
157 Comments to “a critical look at ubuntu feisty beta on an hp nc8430 laptop”
April 10, 2007
thanks dude!
finally a review not based on those “omg i love it just everything rocks
April 10, 2007
Very clear, realistic review. Linux has made some impressive improvements in some respects, but is still archaic in so many areas. For me, it makes a great complement to Windows XP on my Dell B130 laptop, but is not yet suitable as a replacement. As for Ubuntu, I don’t know why it receives such rave reviews for being user friendly. Its hardware detection isn’t all that great, and it lacks the most basic graphical configuration tools, as the author noted regarding xorg configuration. I sure hope Linux improves before Windows Vista starts taking over the world, because I don’t want anything to so with Vista.
April 10, 2007
-Dynamic multi-monitor support SUCKS
word (gfx cards in general as well)
April 10, 2007
In fairness, Linux on laptops is a slow going thing only because laptops as a rule are proprietary almost exclusively.
That being said, the common user isn’t going to care one whit. Further, your review is tainted because you knew where to look and what to look for when things were broken - the average user will not.
Tangentially, I feel as though Linux developers don’t really know what the average user is like. If you have to go to the command line for anything, it’s over their heads. Throw in administrative versus regular user, and it’s enough to have users wishing for a shift death (or MS Vista and the constant UAC clicking).
I really had hoped the Linux community would look at Vista and say ‘here is our chance!’ To some degree, that did happen with Linspire releasing their ‘CNR’ tool to the community - but the community as a whole is still fragmented. I had hoped people would see Linux as a viable alternative to Vista, but too little, too late. I think the ball is in Apple’s court, now.
April 10, 2007
I’ve read this type of review before…the “waiting for the other shoe to drop” review.
What bothered me was that you didn’t take into account a very simple premise that every user should take on
–The average Joe user should not be installing their own operating system–
Had this been pre-installed, most of these bugs would have been worked out or fixed before the user had received the machine. The vast majority of manufactured PC’s have all their driver sets, all their programs, and all of their presets installed by the manufacturer (whether it be Dell, HP in your case, or any other PC mfg).
This isn’t a fair assessment in my view. An accurate comparison is to take the Linux system, and the Windows system, and build it from scratch and see which one works out better.
April 10, 2007
Loonix hates 1680×1050!
I ran into one distro that got it right off the bat though I don’t remember which one. Had to tweak the hell out of my x config on every other distro, which I had to do for beryl at the time I installed it. I agree my desktop runs Kubuntu and I am very pleased with it, my laptop XP. It’s great to have both around and the laptop features are much better with XP. I find that if you use anything but IE and exercise some discretion with file downloads along with common sense and keeping your system up to date you don’t fall prey to the malware nightmare so many people think of when they think of windows. I also have to recommend the uxtheme.dll patch and a decent visual style. I didn’t spend 2000 dollars for my laptop to look like windows 95 and I certainly didn’t pay that much to have my desktop look like it came from the designers at playskool.
April 10, 2007
Good review - I’m running Feisty now, on a Dell XPS laptop, and my experiences were similar. Almost perfect, but not quite. The good news is my screen brightness controls work again (in Edgy they *crashed* my X server), but I still get choppy sound in some games, and some common fonts have disappeared from OpenOffice.
Mounting encrypted partitions (at least /home) during splash boot now works (usplash turns off at the correct moment to let you put in your passphrase), and the whole thing feels pretty slick.
I’m 5 years into using Linux full-time now, and still no regrets. It just keeps getting better, but yes, I wish they could somehow fix stupid things like screen resolution detection - it is 2007, after all!
April 10, 2007
Very good review. It actually covers a lot and highlights the most important issues very nicely without being emotionally loaded. I wish more were like this.
April 10, 2007
The issue with dynamic multi monitor is being solved by the X.org folks. If your laptop had one of these great Intel graphic chipset, you wouldn’t have had any problem, but ATI drivers are so crappy, I suppose they won’t support that until one or two years…
BTW, nvidia drivers have a quite nice nvidia settings tool, allowing you to configure such things without using the command line, and they can bind automatically to the Fn-Fx key…
April 10, 2007
@P.S.V.:
I agree completely, the average user will most probably not know where to look or what to do to fix most of these problems, but that’s my whole point. Initially my intention was to see if I could get it to work 100% without going to the command-line or editing any config files, but this was not possible. I had hoped that this fact was clear from my mini-review.
@Brian:
I can guarantee that if I had to install Windows and Linux from scratch on the same arbirary PC laptop hardware, Windows would support more of the hardware and require less fussing to get it going. Don’t get me wrong: this is not a competition. You’re right that it’s not really fair to compare these two in this regard. However, if Ubuntu wants to capture more of the “average user” market, then it needs to pay more attention to these issues.
April 10, 2007
Big thanks for an extremely straight forward article!
As for laptops hopefully mainstream manufacturers will start adopting open source and make life easier for the community. Its nice to see that Dell is trying…
Thanks again for a great article!
April 10, 2007
I wonder how different your issue would be on one of the Linux laptops that Dell claims to be working on. Presumably they’ll make sure that video and ACPI stuff work perfectly or reasonably close to perfectly.
Those are my biggest pain-points, and they sound like yours as well.
April 10, 2007
I use Ubuntu as my main operating system on my laptop; my wife uses Vista on hers. This reflects the fact that Ubuntu works better than Vista for me, and vice versa for her. There are some things that Ubuntu won’t do that get in the way of my everyday routine, and some things that it would have to do for her to switch.
Things I miss:
*Opensync/SynCE doesn’t work well with my Pocket PC phone. Some company should put resources into this volunteer project, because it’s a big setback in my daily work routine. With windows, meetings and contacts are automatically added to my desktop/address book, and with Ubuntu it’s really a chore.
*Programs don’t automatically ask to save your work when you log out. I know this (since X11 has always been like that), but sometimes (*ahem*) other people just log me out and don’t realize that I’ve lost all my work.
*As the article says, external monitor support works better under Windows.
*A graphical task manager would make things easier for me so I don’t have to go into command lines and awk scripts to kill lots of errant processes.
Things my wife (a filmmaker/media designer) can’t do without:
*PhotoShop. GIMP does a lot, but some of the features (RAW import; color separation) are not of the quality people get from PhotoShop.
*Adobe Premiere. Cinelerra can make good movies with patience and a tolerance for crashes, but is not very intuitive. An intermediate-level movie-making app would go far.
*Dreamweaver. One can make Flash presentations with OpenOffice, but it’s far more limited.
Anyway, just my $.02. I bought a plain-vanilla Intel laptop so it would work with Linux, and haven’t really had any hardware problems; the battery even works as well under Unbuntu. But I did have to return a laptop with a nicer ATI graphics card once because there were no drivers.
April 10, 2007
@Jeff and @Christian:
Actually, this laptop (the NC8430) has a Linux certification by Novell: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/349237-0-0-0-121.html
The certification doesn’t mean all that much, apparently.
I hope that Dell does a better job of it.
April 10, 2007
Enabling LAPTOP_MODE in /etc/default/acpi-support does not enable laptop_mode, you must configure the laptop-mode service to start at boot.
April 10, 2007
The multi-display with a dock is a Linux problem NOT an Ubuntu problem. I had the same thing happen with SLED 10, OpenSuSE 10.2, Fedora 5, and Ubuntu Edgy. A work-around is to clone the display so that both the internal and external monitors receive the same feed. By default the resolution is set to the external monitor resolution and I use krandrtray (KDE) to easily change resolution on the fly when I remove from the dock. All in all this isn’t a big deal, but I agree this needs to be fixed.
April 10, 2007
Good and balanced review.
Ubuntu is clearly one of the most user friendly linux distro but not yet “ready for the desktop”, even if it’s much more than a few years ago.
For your display problem, please check for Xorg 1.3, that should hopefully be included in Ubuntu 7.10. No more xorg.conf file, and hotplug display. That’s what it’s supposed to do, so resolution problem and multi-display should become easy to solve. “Should”. It’s not yet ready, even if looking promising.
For suspend/resume, that’s sadly related to poor drivers and closed source bioses… I don’t really see how it will be solved without the help of manufacturers. same for battery use I guess. The usual linux problem, that the typical user could not care less about. Maybe the Dell move to support Linux could change all this very quickly. That’s an interesting story to follow, the future of Linux relying maybe on it
April 10, 2007
I’m running Edgy right now, on a zd7280 and I have the same problem with 1680×1050. Its funny this problem exists because I was running Fedora at 1680×1050 for the last 2 years with no problems.
I posted about it here.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=386654
Very interesting comments on battery life. I’ve noticed the same thing, battery life is much reduced under Linux.
Otherwise, Linux rocks. You would never get me to go back to Windows.
April 10, 2007
I can’t help but think that your conclusions are slightly premature, given that Feisty is still in beta. I’d be interested in your review of the official release when the time comes — both of Ubuntu and Kubuntu.
April 10, 2007
If the NC8430 have Linux certification by Novell, you should download and install Novell OpenSUSE. Then report back with another review before stating: “The certification doesn’t mean all that much, apparently.”
April 10, 2007
For the ATI drivers though. If you let it install all its automatic updates before enabling the ATI binary drivers, it will set the resolution automagically. I did it on two separate Dells, an e1505 and an e1705. Worked beautifully.
April 10, 2007
I used most of the mayor Linux distributions, from source ones like Gentoo to the easy ones like Ubuntu and Linspire. I also found Ubuntu family products a bit limited on the GUI tools. They should start working on something like the Mandriva Control Center, SuSE Yast, or some GTK applets like RedHat/Fedora uses. Those systems allow monitor and resolution selection, display adapter selection, even allow to set not only the startup services, also to modify them from a GUI.
April 10, 2007
I also recently did a test install of Feisty beta on a desktop with a 1680×1050 monitor. Of course this was a desktop and not a laptop, and I have an Nvidia 7800GT video card. Like you, it booted into a vesa driver with the wrong resolution, however, I did not edit my xorg.conf as you did. I tried out the restricted driver manager. which recognized my card and offered to install the nvidia driver. After doing so, and rebooting as it suggested, (I probably only needed to restart x, but to a noob, a reboot is easier), My monitor was correctly detected with 1680×1050 @ 60hz and a nice accelerated desktop. I suspect, if you had tried the new restricted driver manager and let it do it’s magic before resorting to the command line, you would at least have 1 less thing to criticize. Now if only S3 suspend resume would work. My other criticism is mouse detection. It would be nice if it would recognize the forward and back buttons on my microsoft mouse without having to edit xorg.conf. I can understand it taking a while to get video stuff right, but a mouse? By the next version of Ubuntu, (7.10), a lot of the screen resolution and hot swapping issues should be gone as they will incorporate the new xorg 7.3, which allows hot swapping monitors and greatly improves video card detection. The rate of evolution in Linux and Ubuntu in particular is amazing.
April 10, 2007
Good review. I have the same problem as you have with Windows XP and Vista. I really wouldn’t mind paying for my OS (though I prefer the openness of open source licenses), I just don’t like the current license and anti-piracy measures of Windows. I’ve ditched IE, Outlook Express and MS Office for Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org and heaps of other open source software (including, but not limited to 7-zip, Audacity, VLC and Aptana) a long time ago and am very satisfied thus far. That’s why I keep checking out Ubuntu every once in a while (I have a dual-boot config), hoping it will advance enough for me to finally jump the hoop one day and leave Windows behind for good. I’m no fan boy of either os-es, but I just like the idea of a (partly) community supported OS, without me having to take all kinds of precautions to keep it from phoning home. Besides, the system wide update possibilities are a huge timesaver and there’s plenty of packages for everyday (and not so everyday) tasks.
The biggest thing that’s bugging me right now is the difference in responsiveness between Ubuntu and Windows XP. Ubuntu (I use Kubuntu Feisty) is still sluggish, with the window tearing and all. XP just seems to respond faster than Ubuntu. I have installed the Nvidia proprietary driver, but it still just doesn’t seem to cut it.
I have high hopes though and will be keeping an eye out for Ubuntu. Perhaps one day I’ll make the switch for good. And just so you know, I’ve been a good boy and donated some cash to Ubuntu.
April 10, 2007
This is wrong AFAIK. I have installed numerous WinXP-laptops during my year in tech support; and /not one/ of them had good support out of the box. Windows almost didn’t support any of the hardware, I had to get it all from the internet or from the extra driver-CD. When I installed Ubuntu on them, I didn’t have to do a single thing besides getting 3d-drivers. So, no, Linux «wins».
Another thing, - Linux has less battery life, because AFAIK frequency scaling for the Core 2 Duo processor is not yet supported. But I’m really impressed at how long it lasts without this much-needed feature!
April 10, 2007
You seem to have quite a few geeky needs and can’t really expect to satisfy them withouth doing geeky stuff. While in some cases the requirement to get your hands dirty really is a problem (you don’t have to be a geek to need a proper resolution), in other cases (frequency scaling) a regular user wouldn’t have any problem… because he wouldn’t bother with that stuff.
Also, you can’t really blame FOSS for fglrx being a load of crap.
Anyways, that was a very nice review, I really enjoyed reading it. Good job!
April 10, 2007
Thanks, you’ve made my laptop cooler. Literary … I did not know about that ati trick.
I have to say your laptop works well … mine is worse. I run kubuntu 7.04 on an nx8220 since herd 2 and have finally managed to get suspend and hibernate working (and to my surprise even with fglrx). But now I have no sound after resume for instance. This is also a very well known bug in ubuntu and I’m confident it’ll be fixed before official release as many things have already been..
I’d say it’s working 95% to my satisfaction
Now all I have to do is resist upgrading until it’s stable.
April 10, 2007
Good review! Very interesting and useful. I’d really like to start using Ubuntu as my “real”, day-to-day operating system but, as you say: it’s just not quite there, yet. Maybe in version 8.x …
Kudos to Ubuntu, however, for having come closest to a usable desktop for real users.
April 11, 2007
I don’t really think you were that fare with Linux, but not because I’m a linux fan or whatever, but…
You are comparing a Windows installed system with installing your own linux system… If you actually compare installing linux and how much things work Vs installing Windows, linux wins easily… Keep in mind that in order to have a Win XP installation that “just works” when installing it yourself you first have to spend about 1 hour installing the OS, and then you don’t have a working sound card, wifi, screen resolution, etc. For those to work in a freshly installed windows you have to install a driver for the sound card, one for wifi, one for the video card, etc. On the other hand, a newly installed linux usually recognizes sound card, network and video card, and many times wifi and screen resolution too…
April 11, 2007
Good honest review …
I just hope more manufacturers get on the Linux bandwagon
(Thank you Dell)…
It’s just a matter of time now, Linux will come into its own.
But you have to admit.
Its nice having a choice.
Linux / Windows / BSD …
Cheers.
April 11, 2007
Good review. Finally one that goes beyond the install-and-screenshot stage.
I have to agree that Ubuntu is getting there but I wouldn’t ask my mother to use it. There still is no alternative to Windows for the vast majority of the world. Even if it is pre-installed.
I can imagine my wife trying to troubleshoot a erratic wifi connection or messing with font problems. I guess those are less Ubuntu and more Gnome. My Edgy power management on an AMD Opteron desktop is very flaky, nautilus frequently crashes when writing a CD. And codec support takes some tedium. Hopefully fixed with Fiesty.
April 11, 2007
Good review. Now - take a linux laptop and try to install Vista on it - from a copy you downloaded.
First problem - no laptops built just for linux (or very few) - and what s the reason for that? (hint - nothing much to do with consumer choice)
April 11, 2007
Excellent article but I think some of the problems stem from hardware that is overall not as Linux friendly as other hardware. I bought a Dell 6400 for the reason that all the hardware I was concerned about was nice and Linux happy. The wireless card (Intel) works flawless in Kubuntu 6.10 and connects to my WPA network no problem using knetworkmanager. The graphics (Intel again) works great as well with a small change to a default config file of the 815 resolution program (can’t remember exact name). Other than that, add a few lines to ~/.Xmodmap and all my media buttons work and can be configured for use in amarok. Standby works fine, but I did have to apply a small fix to get Hibernate to work (kernel wasn’t properly using the swap so it would suspend fine, but just boot normally afterwards, and hence borking the swap so it had to be remade).
I chose this Dell because of the Intel graphics and wireless, mainly for the excellent driver support. If more companies put a bit more effort into linux drivers, if would benefit everybody.
April 11, 2007
Maybe this was already corrected, but shouldn’t it be
aticonfig –lsp
not lsb
April 11, 2007
^ Echo what snowman said (although it’s Gentoo, not Ubuntu). And wow, Gentoo sure can get hot, if you know what I mean.
). I thought Edgy and Dapper were good, so I have high expectations.
I’ll have to give Feisty a shot eventually (live CD, installing Gentoo took a few days and there’s no way I’m installing another distro any time soon
April 11, 2007
I have a 1600×1050 display and 6.10 figured it out just fine.
April 11, 2007
Good review, you basically experienced the same things I did when I tried installing Linux (I tried a few distros) on my laptop. In fact, I encounter a lot more problems than you and spend about 50 hours ironing out and fixing the issues. A low of conf files editing, scripts and compiling.
I felt the same way, if I am having all this problem. Imagine a noobie trying to install and setup Linux on their laptop/desktop.
xorg-resolution issue
resume/standby-you nailed it.
power management-same thing
Good review.
April 11, 2007
@dystopianray:
Hmmm, also check the activation scripts in /etc/acpi/power.d (or somesuch). ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE has to be true as well, or the script in init.d won’t start up. Thanks for the note, I’ll look at this more closely.
@proteus71:
They are only a tiny bit premature…
I tested most of these things with Feisty Beta updated to april 10, it should be pretty close to final. I will recheck with the final, don’t worry!
@Odin / Velmont:
Please see my comment to Juan Rozo (below). Also, my NC8430 has a Core Duo, NOT a Core 2 Duo, and the frequency scaling does seem to work (besides that little problem with the Gnome monitoring applet).
@Juan Rozo:
You’re right that initially Linux seems to support more things out of the box, but with Windows you eventually end up with a system that supports everything. Linux reaches some kind of plateau and gets stuck there, especially with laptops.
Once again, my review was not about comparing the two, it was about identifying things that should be looked at if Ubuntu wants more happy laptop users.
@lampshade:
Thanks, I’ve fixed the typo and added you in the “updates”.
April 11, 2007
Great review; I wish Ubuntu’s wireless networking support had made it this far when I first tried it on my laptop running Breezy as that was a huge pain and I eventually gave up and put Windows back on my laptop; after all I get Windows for free from my school.
I think Feisty will be a great release for us idiot-zealot Linux users with the advancements because we can pretty safely say it will work better out of the box, “oh and did I mention it has a full office suite, for free?”
April 11, 2007
Thing is, AMD/API openly does NOT support Beryl on Linux. Another thing is that (who the hell writes code like that?) the video BIOS of most laptops does not support the native resolution of the LCD panel. The proprietary Windows driver does not care, but poor Linux is in deep trouble with that.
With that said, I do not like that I need to manually switch xorg.conf files to be able to work on my panel or on my LCD monitor. I can’t get it working with the same file, just can’t.
April 11, 2007
I agree with the suspend/resume “features”, It has never ever worked to my satisfaction. I’ve had my fair share late nights trying to make things work, and as you also stated, adding XGL to mix and you’ll go bonkers.
To comment on the mulit-monitor stuff. I totally agree with you. I have to edit xorg.conf whatever I do, it’s broken by design. I always wish when I’m fiddling with that file, trying to run a presentation on an unknown projector/LCD, that someday, someone will come forward and write a VGA display subsystem that actually Just Works(tm).
April 11, 2007
Good to hear someone gets their wireless working off-the-shelf. My older Prism 2.5 -wlan isn’t even recognised as a wireless device in Feisty Beta.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/ bug/91385
So no wireless network for me in Feisty at the moment. Edgy seems to be using the orinoco driver, which apparently is the wrong one, but that’s the only driver that works in edgy so that’s fine with me. No WPA/WPA2 for the wireless because this card simply doesn’t support it. I haven’t even gotten WEP to work.
So I won’t be upgrading to Feisty any time soon unless the wireless issue has been resolved.
April 11, 2007
I had absolutely no problems getting my 1680×1050 widescreen LCD and older ATI 9250 working properly with Ubuntu Edgy or the Feisty beta. I suspect that’s because my chipset is much better supported by X.org, and was able to detect the available resolutions at install time.
Anyway, it might be worth playing with installing fglrx before tweaking the xorg.conf, just to see if that might get you over the line.
April 11, 2007
2 comments:
1. ATI sucks. You know it, I know it. It just does.
If you want to have the best support possible on your laptop then your going to have to go all-intel. Currently the GMA 950 with the 945G chipsets are your best bet.
If you require high performance 3d for whatever reason then your only choice is Nvidia.
However keep in mind that the Intel onboard is perfectly capable of driving a 3d desktop comfortably and still be perfectly good at playing games up to (and including) enemy-territory type complexity.
(with the one major caveat that you still have to depend on 915resolution hack to support widescreen resolutions)
Not that I expect you to ditch your current setup any time soon, but that’s just how it is currently in Linux-land.
2nd point:
Look for X.org 7.3 release to go out and fix the multimonitor problem in a big way. (hopefully).
X.org release 7.2 was more of a maintainance bug-fix for 7.1. Made things like composition work better.
With 7.3 the X.org developers are wanting to integrate the excellent Linux hotplug support into X configuration and utilize desktop oriented features like Dbus and HAL to get hotplug configuration and support for Monitors and input devices.
They are getting rid of the ultimate dependance on xorg.conf. So hopefully X will be able to be reconfigured on the fly without having to edit xorg.conf anymore.
The Intel video driver support will benifit from newer memory management support in Mesa and DRI, improving performance slightly and making better use of system memmory.
Also the modsetting stuff will help eliminate the need for 915resolution hack and make hotplug monitor support much better.
I figure that once these changes are complete then Linux support for displays will match closely to what you can get from XP. (maybe 7.5 will match Vista?)
OF course this is what they _want_ to do. Not nessicarially what will happen. But that’s just how these things work.
Don’t expect any of this stuff to fix your video card’s problems though. X and Linux developers are not able to compinsate for ATI’s shitastic support. The only real solution for them is to follow Intel’s lead and go open source, but I think they are much to deep into the ‘IP’ horseshit to ever come back out of it. At least not anytime soon.
April 11, 2007
I tried it out on my home desktop after reading your article - nothing new or fancy, everything is 2 - 3 years old.
Booted off live disc, hit enter (keyboard works here), and waited for all the pretty stuff. Boots into the GUI - mouse and keyboard (logitech dinovo desktop) no longer work. I found out that its a known bug, but thats pretty basic stuff that doesnt work. I plugged in another mouse (but dont have another keyboard) and found out that it didnt pick up my wireless card at all - a Belkin that worked just fine in 6.04. It says Im connected to a wired network despite my ethernet cable not being plugged into this particular desktop …
Ubuntu seem to be going backwards. Older versions used to install flawlessly and pick up all my kit. Adding all this eye candy is a joke. What good is eye candy if my mouse and keyboard dont work? And I cant get on the internet the way it just works in other distros and Windows?
Hopefully these issues were merely a beta problem, but I’m not holding my breath.
April 11, 2007
Great review! I’ve been using ubuntu for the past 2 years now, and i must say, feisty is a huge improvement, although not yet perfect. Its good to see that little by little ubuntu (and linux in general) are coming along very quickly.
I do think though that as a linux user, its a good idea to be choosing linux friendly hardware instead of just expecting linux to work on everything. ever since i went 100% linux I’ve made an effort to pick hardware that is 100% compatible, and if possible 100% open. My main system for example is running all open source software. With an intel GMA950 video required no driver or config tweaking after the installation, even for running beryl. My AMD based laptop on the other hand, required a bunch of work to get the ATI video to even render correctly.
I think just picking up any laptop and expecting it to be 100% linux compatible is a bit silly… Since you have to realise that when laptops are sold with windows on them, they do come pre installed with all the extra drivers and settings configured. It is likely that an off the shelf system would have just as much trouble with a base windows install as it would with linux. Although some of your complaints (like editing config files) are still a big problem with linux for new users. But just today i spent 3 hours trying to track down the correct sound drivers for a windows system… and i did it by getting the correct information from a liveCD and running lspci.
April 11, 2007
Realistic review, but you would be much more satisfied if you were testing this on desktop. Laptops are well supported, but there are some things that require editing configuration files and others, that shouldn’t be difficult for experienced users; novices may have slight problems on that.
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has many CNR (Click’n'Run) features, and it’s getting better every day.
April 11, 2007
Good review but I think your excellent knowledge of Linux got ahead of you. I’ve been on Edgy for a week so far relying only on support I find on the Web. So far, except for VPN access, I haven’t been back to Windows…and I am a noob.
April 11, 2007
Just a small tangent - one thing that often gets overlooked in reviews is the infrared support. This is especially key to a laptop review IMHO. I haven’t seen irda etc working properly ‘out of the box’ (and wrapped up into a neat user friendly interface), on any distro yet.
I think that basic things like this should be the focus in order to promote a free OS. Flashy stuff like 3D desktops can come later.
BTW I’m currently running Ubunutu Edgy Eft on an IBM T41 and loving it, even if I have to ‘geek out’ to get things done from time to time. However, I do look forward to a “Just Works(tm)” system, soon hopefully.
April 11, 2007
Teaching in China.
Nividia 7400 (256 mb) Fiesty
Nividia has a new and excellent card tool for projectors! After killing myself with Xorg- I discovered it. No problem getting perfect 1280×800 cloned output. Feisty is full time on my Core Duo. No reason to use Windoze! Feisty is much faster and useful with Beryl/Tomboy notes. I use a cooling pad- no worries about heat anyway. I don’t expect Linux to be perfect- just better than XP. My students allways have USB stick viruses (no problem). Faster Linux app load,boot,USB unmount. Xp ha ha.
April 11, 2007
Just for the record. I believe that the recommended way of configuring the xserver in debian/ubuntu is to write
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
The file /etc/X11/xorg.conf contains some sort of warning in the header, but I admit that this warning is a little vague.
It would be cool to be able to do dpkg-reconfigure from synaptic.
April 11, 2007
To easily add the proper resolutions and graphic support, one can run the following line in the terminal:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
They will be taken to a text-based configuration service that will maximize the potential of the computer. It is not very easy for a novice, but I think that an improved GUI is on the way.
April 11, 2007
Regarding the issue you get with the CPU frequency after resume, this is due to how the kernel handles suspending with multicore systems. To do multi-core suspending you have to have CPU hotplugging enabled, this is due to the fact that when suspending CPU1 is essentially “unplugged” and CPU0 does all the work. When you resume CPU1 is hotplugged back in and due to the way that the frequency scaling works it gets the default governor which is generally (and apparently in your case too) Performance, hence you get stuck on max frequency. Easiest way to fix it is to run cpufreq-set to set the scaling governor back to whatever it is in Ubuntu (don’t use it myself) or restart the service that sets this to begin with if Ubuntu uses one.
April 11, 2007
Sabayon gets it all right on my Macbook Pro and Dell E1705. Its is truly the best out of the box distro there is. Too bad it is based on a dying distro.
April 11, 2007
Nice review. I’ve been using Linux since I got Mandrake 7.1! SUSE 10.0 ran best on my old box but, now it’s loaded with Edgy. For the most part I love it. It’s now my wife’s machine and since she never really dealt with Windows, she’s learning on Ubuntu and she loves it. She’s become a bit of a Linux evangelist now in fact! Telling her friends and business “you should try Linux”. She tells me “they look at me like I’ve got 2 heads”. Ha! The main reasons I stick with Linux are:
No viruses (to speak of)
NO constant policing of the registry to see what’s attached itself there (like Windows…I know there’s no “registry” here)
Everything is free!
The last reason is best IMO. Open Office, Anarok, silly games, Evolution. I mean, this is the BIG selling point. How may people run out and pay as much as a basic laptop for MS Office because they feel they “have to”?
I’m willing to put up with the little quirks and rather enjoy watching things improve (however slowly). Having said that, wait till my wife boots up the machine tonight! I’m installing Debian Etch on it! I’m an unabashed Linux Junkie although I use OSX 80% of the time. I love OSX too.
April 11, 2007
Good review… I don’t like to hassle with alphas/betas so I’m waiting for t the official release, but so far seems promising.
April 11, 2007
This review can not cover every Feisty installation. If you’re experiencing a problem with your ATI card on this specific HP notebook model it doesn’t mean, that the same problem is with the differrent hardware vendor/setup. You have to try all this on a differrent machines to tell people such verdicts. Sorry, man.
But quite good review though.
April 11, 2007
Thanks for a great review and some very good tips. I will (attempt) to put Feisty on my Vaio SZ as soon as it is out of Beta. I expect a lot of the peculiar Sony stuff not to work out of the box.
I am not anti XP - it’s still the OS for games - but I am tired of having to reinstall XP every 4 months to get the Vaio spinning like it should. The famous drop for me was that it (the Vaio running XP) will no longer shut-down properly.
April 11, 2007
Hi, just love the Feisty Beta and think this was a good review for making a picture of the problems that has to be improved.
I have everything working except my webcam and a slow boot (believe it has with my dvd-rom to do “ata2″), running comiz instead of beryl cause of ATI. Through the good comunity i can get it exactly where i want. Very fast and Secure.
When i started with linux i was a noob, everyone is at first. Cause of the community it’s not hard understanding xorg.conf and other basic things. You know where to look to find you’re answeares.
You are a bit wrong about installing windows although you were right that all the hardware work. It take longer, for me about a day to get all working properly (finding drivers, proggs i like, installing them). Same deal in winows with the resolution. After i have to tune it a couple of times a month, cleaning it up. The firewall, msn, skype and autostart applications that i use daily hogs my machine and make it slow. I make a format/re-install within 6 month cycles.
If i get webcam working i’ll make the switch cause my girl needs it when chatting with her family and problably only running win xp through a emulator like virtualbox or something.
April 11, 2007
Hey Charl,
Found you on digg, thanks for this review. I was thinking on going Ubuntu for my work laptop (nc2400) where I also have another 19” LCD that I need to hook it up to every morning and of course lots of hibernating - since work is never done in those 8-12 hours..
Been with Linux since 1999, but still agree with you that in XP it just works, which is a bit frustrating. However I installed several Ubuntu’s to completely “uncomputered” people, and they love it!
April 11, 2007
Try Mepis 6.5 is very friendly
April 11, 2007
I’ve been using edgy for a while, and I think you hit the nail right on the head.
Ubuntu, like almost every other Linux distro I’ve ever tried in the last 10 years, is great and incredibly frustrating at the same time.
Their goal seems to be “it just works”, but they never quite finish. They pronounce it “working” when it doesn’t, and move on to new features.
The fact that power management is still a mess even after years of work is quite frankly, pathetic. When Microsoft beats you that soundly, you should be embarrassed.
However, there’s not a doubt in my mind that my Thinkpad T60 is far more nimble under Ubuntu than XP. What would be nice is if it didn’t needlessly gobble the battery, and if it didn’t crash the machine half the time when I suspend it. It seems that I have a choice: be a bit annoyed all the time with windows, or sometimes thrilled and sometimes want to kill someone with Ubuntu.
One boneheaded design I want to point out: Nautilus gives you the OSX-like functionality of being able to mount smb drives, with a beautiful, easy to use gui. But guess what. It doesn’t actually mount drives. It just acts as an smb client. So if you want to use the drive in some other program, you’re out of luck. What an idiotic, horrible design! Just mount the damn drive somewhere!
April 11, 2007
Give PCLinuxOS 2007 a try when its released. It’s at Test Release 3 and TR4 coming soon. This distro is getting many Ubuntu converts.
April 11, 2007
I´m, sort of what you would call the average user.
More advanced than most, but left all my programing ability and so on back in highschool.. I´ve been wanting to switch to linux for a long time, but haven´t because i jsut don´t want to have to go to the command line, or to writting scripts or all that other “techy” crap to get my OS to work properly.
If you get a straight forward linux installation, that allows me to properly install my drivers and so on with out having to recode the world than i´m there, but I´ve been waiting for many years and still nothing.
That´s what´s keeping linux from advancing further into the OS MARKET
April 11, 2007
Please see the note under “Updates” in the main post regarding the domain migration and possibly lost comments. Thanks!
April 11, 2007
I think Ubuntu IS ready for the desktop, but not the laptop.
April 11, 2007
I had a similar experience with Ubuntu Edgy and a Dell Inspiron 9100. Granted, the laptop itself is about 4 years old now, but it seemed to be the *worst* machine I could’ve picked to start Linux on.
Drivers were nowhere to be found and getting my ATI video working was a pain. I’m eager to see if Feisty helps any of these problems.
I’m probably going to have to dual boot it, though (currently it only runs Ubuntu, but school requires Windows programs) so I’ll get the chance to start again from scratch on both OSes.
Great article!
April 11, 2007
I have never understood this “not ready for desktop users” comment that sort of follows Ubuntu reviews. It certainly is very easy to use and I have the christian edition (im not into god but it has a pretty good we filter) on my childrens PCs, the youngest of whom is 5 and the eldest 11, they all find it easier than XP. 10/10 for this.
The question here, and the article itself, is not really about “Is Ubuntu ready for the desktop user” as that question really is long past. The questions really are “Are there enough drivers out in the wild” and “is installation easy”.
As far as the drivers go, you can never have enough in the wild. I would say for the most part yes there is “enough” to make most people able to run as good as with XP. However it is a bit of an all or nothing game with drivers, either you can get them or you can not. If you can not then obviously Ubuntu will seem like a waste of time. So for this I would give it 8/10 (I doubt 20% of drivers are unavailable but if they arn’t your stuffed)
As far as the actual installation, well the “actual” installation itself is easy, installing my nvidia card was a cinch on 7.04 but a pig on 6.06, on 6.06 I had to make sure I downloaded the right driver and then type some stuff into the terminal. However with 7.04 my card was detected and all I had to do was go to the “restricted drivers manager” and tick a box for it to install everything and set it up, try doing that with just an XP disc in your hands. However, some people are still left out of this easy route and will have to search the web for instructions. However that in itself is not hard really even for the average user. I suppose 7/10 would be a fair score as I expect 70% of users would have no problem (yes it is a guess but it could be bit more, could be a bit less).
Personally
XP - used it for years, a really nice OS that has very few problems for the average user, driven a lot of tech support guys out a job too I bet as it was a massive improvement on win98 which is what most people were using. If there is a driver for your hardware you can almost certainly get it if you have XP. Installation, from my own experience, is actually harder with XP than Ubuntu in almost every case though, but once you get it up and running it tends to stay that way for quite a while. 8/10 (would score higher but almost always needs to either download drivers or have a drivers disc)
6.06 - used for 2 months, needs a bit of confidence as it does require you to use the web to solve a lot of problems (codecs and the like) I think I could give it a total score of about 7/10 (would score as an equal to XP if it wasn’t for the constant use of terminal and the “all be it rare” driver problems.
7.04 - only used it for a week, I have not had to use Terminal at all and it all works well so far. So far I would score it well above XP but for the fact you might not have a driver, this is rare but it is a factor and needs to be taken into account. 8/10 (Its easier to use than XP but if your one of the rare cases that can’t find a driver then your stuffed)
Great article though, its nice (but sad) to here of the problems ubuntu has with some folks computers as praise is now too easy to find. Maybe one day eh?
April 11, 2007
Thanks for this review, but I disagree with you, the problem of the hardware support is responsibility of the hardware companies and not a problem of GNU/Linux.
Where you download the drivers? from the hardware company’s website or the windows’s website, why must be different for GNU/Linux?
I agree with that is an important problem, but we have the freedom to claim for drivers for Linux or prefer hardware with Linux support.
April 11, 2007
Good review, you present both sides well. I just want to make the point that there is no such thing as a seamless OS transition, and to believe the average user can start using Linux just like his XP is foolish. While making things easier and more automated is always a good idea, you can’t be afraid to learn something new and tweak things to your preferences. OK, so nobody enjoys editing config files, but it took me all of a week to learn the basics and now I can do it pretty easily. Perhaps XP doesn’t have configs to edit, but the preference windows are a nightmare! I’d rather grep through a text file than slowly and tediously navigate a series of settings windows. My point is, writing scripts to handle things for you, and editing configs are just the Linux way to tweak certain settings, and I think it’s a faster, easier way anyways. If you aren’t willing to learn something, stick to windows, just know that you aren’t getting the best possible computing experience.
All that said, I still agree with you that many things need improvement. There are many points where Linux needs to catch up, but it’s really not their fault. It’s no secret that M$ has been doing a lot to impede the growth of Linux, and they’ve got deals with a lot of companies to prevent Linux support on new hardware. Just be patient, and hope the Linux devs can reverse engineer your hardware soon.
And again, thanks for the review. It’s good to see someone who’s not just wasting my time presenting only one side of the story.
TDP
April 11, 2007
> Because fglrx doesn’t support the XComposite extension,
> I could not install AIGLX (Ubuntu default) and had to
> go for XGL and Beryl.
You can use AIGLX with the Open Source “radeon” driver, it’s more than enough for running at least Beryl smoothly. Just as a note, however, now that you have fglrx installed, just changing xorg.conf to radeon isn’t enough, but you need to blacklist or uninstall fglrx because it interferes with the radeon driver.
April 11, 2007
Just a note for everyone to keep in mind… user experiences differ. Windows also doesn’t always “just work” for everyone. I have a Dell laptop running Windows XP. When I suspend and undock it, Windows forgets that I have an external monitor (upon subsequent re-docking). I have to slip my hand in between the screen and kb (hard to do, since the dock has a “shelf” above the laptop) and hit fn+F8 in order to get Windows to recognize the monitor again.
As long as there are computers, they will have hardware problems. As long as there is software to run on those computers, the software will have bugs. Do your own research, and use what you like.
(Good article, BTW)
April 11, 2007
Nice review - honest, informative, and concise. However, as others have said, this is a specific card on a specific laptop. On my Dell Latitude laptop, I get better battery life in Kubuntu than I do in Windows (4:30 versus 3:50).
Aside from that, I agree that there needs to be more GUI applications to configure files like Xorg.conf, menu.lst, etc. In regards to a performance monitor and “task manager”, Kubuntu has a couple nice GUI applications to display the equivalent of `top` or `ps` but there is always room for improvement.
What I like is that even though you had those problems, there was a way to fix the problem - sometimes it is as easy as searching ubuntuforums.com/ and sometimes it requires editing some config. files. Usually, when I’m in trouble in Windows, which doesn’t happen as often but is often a bigger problem, if I can’t find a forum post in a random forum or a topic in the Microsoft KB, I’m SOL.
Good article, and I await (Kubuntu) Feisty Fawn.
April 11, 2007
I use ubuntu at home and at work… and it’s a real pleasure to use it.
i have to edit some Config files and scripts to make all work in my HP dv6110 and in my MacBook, but is one thing that is like that….
The reality is that linux has no contract with any hardware. Don’t expect miracles… and if the drivers are not open source. PLEASE… the rules of the game are clear… LINUX is running with obstacles.
Still love my ubuntu (or any other non Window$ system or non Mac OS system) because is the only way to use your head day by day. I like to learn something new every day.
But i accept that the learning curve have to be progressive, soo there is Window$ to begin.
April 11, 2007
The cdrom that comes with a windows mouse (that most of us throw away) has the “scale” feature for windows. The question is which came first, I assume microsoft has had this feature for a while, how long have beryl and others had it?
On your laptop run windows xp with vmware player with ubuntu installed on top of that and get the best of both worlds.
April 11, 2007
Put simply…
If I install a clean copy of Windows XP (non Compaq specific) on my laptop, I run into all sorts of problems.
I have to install sound, video, countless other drivers and progs.
Honestly, Linux does a pretty damn good job getting things to work first time.
If only the industry would offer more support.
April 11, 2007
i think linux is extremely hardware-dependent in the pc-market. on one of my laptops, ubuntu 6.10 finds everything, on another one, it misses some stuff. if you have linux-friendly hardware, you won’t have many problems. so linux is ready for some laptops and some desktops, it just depends on the hardware. the same is true for windows. try as a i might, i can’t get windows xp to install on my ultrasparc 10 or my iMac, whereas there are linux-versions which install and recognise almost all components on these two computers.
April 11, 2007
Nice review of Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn. It’s almost coming to end of April. I wonder if they will be able to release the final candidate on time.
April 11, 2007
I enjoyed reading the review and comments. Thanks.
In some sense you have an uneven comparison since XP is a mature product (and already installed, as some mentioned) while Ubuntu Feisty is a new release. Perhaps a closer comparison would be to compare a new install of the latest Ubuntu and a new install of Windows Vista. My (desktop) experience in installing Vista was that the graphics card performance was worse than XP and my printer was not supported.
April 11, 2007
Very nice review.
I have been saying the same things for a while.
IMO for Linux to ever have a chance it needs to be even more user friendly then Win. OSX style friendly. I think its getting there but is no where near ready for mainstream adoption.
Projects like PCLOS, Mepis, Freespire are a step in that direction. However I still believe Linux is a far way out to taking on MSFT on the desktop.
Does anyone think that 50yr old dad/mom is gonna want to do things via command line? Sure its easy for those of us that know it but not for the avg user.
Until these major distros realize that. Nothing will change and honestly it hasn’t over the past 6 years.
April 11, 2007
Windows: more hardware support out of the box, easier to install? These words come from a specific demographic of the population, people who don’t do Windows installs. Now a restore to the factory load is probably very simple, although that has nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with professional integrators configuring the default install. But if you need a bare Windows install, paticularly of a different minor version than was shipped on a proprietary laptop with a screwball default resolution, be prepared for an uphill battle (I really hope you aren’t downgrading, as drivers are in all likelihood not available or tested). If you are doing a clean install of Windows to a laptop (as is often nessasary for someone in a corporate environment where a standard load has to be reached, but this paticular laptop wasn’t bought in quanity (happens a lot more than people think)) Windows will require many trips to hardware manufacturer’s websites. This is not a fair comparison as the integrator has done the work nessasary to make everything Just Work in preconfigured instances. Herein lies the rub: we buy Windows PCs and complain that the “Linux Community” just isn’t doing enough to make Linux a “viable” desktop. If we aren’t buying Linux PCs and aren’t willing to pay anyone to professionally configure our OS of choice (or second choice, as the case may be) then I think our Linux installations are going to look amateur (suprise), no amount of of kernel hacking and packaging is going to change that. It seems to me that Linux distributors would be well served to test and certify a few systems, and perhaps maintain an HCL (doesn anyone do that anymore). A final note, with 100% certainty, giving an end-user who’s never installed an OS before a clean system with no OS and a Windows CD and an Ubuntu CD, they are going to get further with the Ubunutu CD, barring significant (and unlikely) hardware incompatiblity (no support for the Hard Disk or CD-ROM for instance, (which is less likely in Linux than Windows since Linux support lots more Disk/CD-ROM controllers than Windows does).
April 11, 2007
I too have an nc8430, and installed Fedora Core 6 on it (see the linked website). I got almost everything to work, except the resume from suspend to RAM, where the touchpad doesn’t work anymore (USB mouse does work though). Any idea, what I should do?
April 11, 2007
@Gérard Milmeister:
Your site was very useful while I was configuring Ubuntu on this laptop, thanks!
With regards to your touchpad: on Ubuntu this part actually did Just Work(tm)
I’ve just had a look at the /etc/acpi/suspend.d and resume.d scripts, and can’t see anything that seems to be related to the touchpad. I do often see the message “synaptics reset failed” after resume from RAM.
April 11, 2007
you keep talking about XGL…! but Feisty (this has been present since Edgy!!) has inbuilt AIGLX or similiar that will allow Beryl and others to run WITHOUT XGL, only the nVidia drivers! I’ve had no problems with it whatsoever on Edgy (Xubuntu 7.04 is too buggy for me right now :S)
April 11, 2007
ATI video chips will getcha every time.
Buy NVidia or Intel.
April 11, 2007
Great review. Lucky for me I’ve never had to deal with any laptop or ATI installations, but I’ve still had my share of problems on my desktop and work systems. As a whole Linux (including) Ubuntu has come a long way in the last few years. I still remember the nightmare of trying to setup a winmodem in RedHat around 1998. >.
April 11, 2007
(sorry squinty smiley face cut off the end of my last post)
With a little more work Ubuntu (Linux), KDE (and sadly Gnome), and Compiz/Beryl will be a big competition in the OS market for the average joe/jane.
April 11, 2007
I tried the Feisty Beta myself and I can say I was impressed with the way the distro has evolved since I first started using Ubuntu several years ago. However, I agree that its still not “fully there” yet when it comes to everything working and functioning beautifully out of the box. However, they are making incredible progress I think with Ubuntu and I think the next few releases are going to be that much more interesting.
April 12, 2007
Hello,
Nice review also very nice posts from meny people here.
I just got brand new notebook from HP (dv6205us) with Windows Vista Basic edition and it is very slowwwwww!!!! I can’t explain you how slow is this. For starting Internet explorer i wait about 30 seconds.
For “My Computer” about 40-50 seconds. GAMES??? OH NO!!!
If i want to put Windows XP on that notebook (there is no driver for sound, wifi and Video). (i Write to HP they told me that and also they told me ‘don’t try’).
I just wondering if i try to install Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn 7.04 (beta) do i really need to edit someting in terminal?
Here is my notebook specification.
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=343922&pfp=cat1
Regards for all people here.
April 12, 2007
Considering how bad ATI supports linux i’m truly impressed with how you were able to make it work.
If you ever buy a new laptop though, go with any other graphics card vendor
ATI gave you the finger and you were geeky enough to make it work. RESPECT
April 12, 2007
I appreciate the review for staying away from any flame-wars. However, there is a lot of bias in comparing the difficulties in installation of Linux with the ease of using Windows. You should have perhaps bought a linux-preinstalled system, used it for 6 mths and written a review. I have switched to Ubuntu both on my laptop and at home and its amazing how much flexibility you have. By focusing on the first few day, you have not brought out the joy of living with linux.
April 12, 2007
Video/monitor issues are the primary reason I don’t think 7.04 is quite there yet. One thing I did notice though is that nVidia has far better drivers than ATI. With nVidia cards, you can run nvidia-settings and get a nice dialog box where you can make any changes you need similar to what you would find in Windows.
It’s getting there…
April 12, 2007
Oh, it is so very knowledgeable and cool. Or shall I say cold?!
Yes, it is wrong to be an idiot zealot, but. We’re talking free software trying to offer users an alternative to a ruthless monopoly. But mister has gripes.
And, why this preoccupation with the average user?! Linux offers something which is indeed of no interest to many - the chance to get under the hood, learn and become a more powerful user.
A more apt way of looking at Win vs Lin - the uninitiated, captive of what fodder is tossed at them, vs choice and power in return for the effort of learning and participating. It’s a perfectly legit choice to go Win, but it’s not mine.
This review would have been fair had it dealt with a proprietary offer. It seems to expect things instead of being grateful for them.
What it misses is that it’s dealing with a beautiful blossom.
April 12, 2007
1. You can use the free ATI drivers which support AIGLX and Composite to use Desktop Effects
2. Windows XP never “just worked” out of the bow on most of my laptops. Eg. SDCard device on my V6V, PCMCIA cards on my Inspiron 8200… So the fact that a *beta* of Ubuntu doesn’t work “out of the box” is quite a normal thing, I guess.
April 12, 2007
I really don’t understand why you see all those as Ubuntu/Linux issues, That is totally wrong. I think all those are HP(or whoever made it) issues, they should have normally made sure that everything works and should have fixed those in linux itself, since they have access to it. So don’t say linux is imperfect, they can’t patch all the problems with every laptop on the planet. Either you should help them to do it or HP should. Your way of thinking is just unfair.
April 12, 2007
@tatadeluxe:
Passing the buck of Linux driver development to the manufacturers may be the fair thing to do, but isn’t going to help one bit. The hardware manufacturers won’t bite, as the linux community is just too small.
Until the Linux community reaches critical mass, GNU/Linux simply has no choice but to work on its own hardware support.
@Patric Conant:
Good point, but as I’ve said before: Ubuntu (and other advanced distributions) will initially probably support more components out of the box, but generally reaches its plateau faster with laptops. With Windows you eventually end up with a fully supported system.
@Michael:
Give the livecd a shot. The nice thing is, you can try out much of Ubuntu without touching your hard drive.
@Haim Roitgrund:
Relax dude, I appreciate the blossom, it’s just taking it’s frikking time to come to bloom.
It would be nice if Linux could appeal to *both* the tinkerers, and to people who just want to get a job done. Ubuntu (and many other distributions) have indicated that they really want this second group of users as well.
@CC_machine and @Niko:
AIGLX does NOT work on the fglrx drivers, and the open source Radeon driver does NOT support my ATI X1600, so I *have* to use Xgl if I want those nice desktop effects.
@lexan:
I’ve done my fair share of contributing to Linux on laptops.
I implemented the first hibernation support for ATI Radeons back in 2003 and this is still being used in all XFree86 code and x.org code. See http://cpbotha.net/software/dri_resume for example.
My post is not about blaming anyone for anything, it’s about identifying issues that need work in Ubuntu specifically and in Linux in general.
April 12, 2007
As I don’t find it easy to contribute code, I buy some of the ‘free’ software I use.
I ‘bought’ ubuntu on a laptop pre-installed by someone at http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk and it all ‘Just Works(tm)’. They must have put some time and effort into into getting everything working.
My last not-so-good laptop had WinXP pre-installed and that worked as well. They must have paid some Engineers (hopefully) to getting everything working.
That’s what you expect when the OS is pre-installed.
Buying a system with Linux already on it should be the ‘normal’ way for a Linux