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    Linux question

    Discussion in 'Alienware 14 and M14x' started by tyler27, Mar 11, 2012.

  1. tyler27

    tyler27 Notebook Consultant

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    ive been thinking of running linux on the m14x but off a flash drive instead of dual booting but my questions are

    does it improve battery life?
    how well does it work with the nvidia chip and the intel chip?
    and which version would be the best, ive always been a ubuntu fan but im curious about others
     
    tyler27, Mar 11, 2012
    #1
  2. PhillyFloyd

    PhillyFloyd Newbie

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    It can be done, however there is no auto-switching of the GPU yet available in any linux distro or driver, you pretty much are stuck using the intel chipset for graphics, which is fine if running from a USB you aren't doing any compositing or GLX anyway.

    You'll need to blacklist the nouveau driver and remake the initrd image in order to prevent nouveau (FOSS nVIDIA driver) from taking over during the KMS (kernel mode setting) stages of the bootup.

    It's fairly simple and painless if you start with a pre-nouveau distro, like CentOS6, then it will work out-of-the-box so long as you don't upgrade to CentOS6.1 or higher ... any Fedora > 14 also have the nouveau.
     
    PhillyFloyd, Mar 11, 2012
    #2
  3. ponx

    ponx Notebook Consultant

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    I think there's a project called Bumblebee ( https://launchpad.net/~bumblebee) that implements graphics card switching under Linux. Not sure how well it works...

    And I would try Linux Mint first of all; it's based on Ubuntu, but comes with tons of stuff pre-configured out-of-the-box...

    ponx
     
    ponx, Mar 13, 2012
    #3
  4. Pete- 7r0jan

    Pete- 7r0jan Notebook Consultant

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    I'm running Ubuntu & Backtrack 5 from thumb drive's.
    works perfectly fine for what i want.
     
    Pete- 7r0jan, Mar 13, 2012
    #4