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.
Related posts:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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!
Try Mepis 6.5 is very friendly
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!
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.
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
Please see the note under “Updates” in the main post regarding the domain migration and possibly lost comments. Thanks!
I think Ubuntu IS ready for the desktop, but not the laptop.
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!
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?
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.
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
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
@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.
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)
ATI video chips will getcha every time.
Buy NVidia or Intel.
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. >.
(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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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…
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.
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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.
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.