Anybody installed Linux on a recently bought laptop?

Looking for success stories about installing Linux on recent high end laptops, like Thinkpad T60, Asus V1JP or G2, ... .

 

Linux will run on it all. Core 2 Duos, nVidia discrete graphics, its all good. You just have to be wary on a few things. ATi graphics card work perfectly fine, but nVidia's performance blows them away, so if you're looking to game or render, go nVidia. Likewise, choose an Intel wireless card, as they have the best support in Linux, and are easiest to set up. Other than that, all new laptops will run Linux fine.

 

Intel core 2 duo means I would prob better be installing 64bit version, right? Are there differences in the 64bit versions of the major distributions? Which one to install, amd64 or ia64?

 

ia64 is for Intel Xeon processors. But, you'll find some program incompatibility with 64 bit operating systems, so it's probably best to stick with the 32 bit (i386 up to i686). 64 bit applications run slightly faster than their 32 bit counterparts, but not nearly enough to make it feasible.

 

The Thinkpad T60 features an ATi card, so as Lysander said, you'll have some performance issues. Currently nVidia's Linux drivers are more efficient. But other than that, you should be all gold, especially on the Thinkpad. Back when they were sold by IBM directly, Linux was quite popular and if I'm not mistaken, it was available as an option for pre-installation.

But everything Lysander said is right, and I would also recommend sticking with a 32-bit OS for now. A 64-bit CPU is more than capable of running 32-bit operating systems and applications.

 

there's no flash plugin for 64-bit Linux yet, either.

gotta have my youtube...

 

The T60 should run wonderfully with Linux. I've only ever put a livecd in my work T43, but it runs like a top, wireless and everything works, so I see no reason why the T60 shouldn't be the same. I've got 32-bit Kubuntu 6.10 on my laptop (see sig) and everything works on it. I only haven't tried the camera or the TPM/fingerprint reader, but those aren't important to me. Wireless, bluetooth, nvidia card, even a lot of the special buttons like volume control and such, all work straight out of the box. You could do much worse when looking for a Linux compatible laptop than the HGL-30.

 

Thanks to all. About the ati card, I'm a bit puzzled. What is it that I won't be able to do or do so well compared to an nvidia card?

 

The problem is that the ATI drivers for Linux aren't as well supported. I don't have any first hand experience, but from what I have read I am pretty sure that cards that would perform similarly in Windows would tip their hand to the nVidia card now. Also, this means the ATI will be hard to setup.

 

Well, generally 3D performance is a little poorer than on the comparable nVidia card. Traditionally, they have been hard to install as well, but I'm not sure if this is still the case today; I've never had to install ATi drivers. They also don't support as many features, as Linux uses OpenGL as its graphics API, and nVidia has traditionally been very supportive of OpenGL and perform better at OpenGL duties.

 

ATI's drivers don't support the Composite extension, and there's no plan of them being able to soon, so they'll lose a fair bit in running things like Beryl, etc. But ATI's older cards are very well supported. But that's not what you're looking at, you're looking at new hardware. NVIDIA's drivers are the best and most feature-complete, next to Intel's cards, which have full open-source drivers, but are dog slow.

 

I really wish Intel made better video hardware, cause I'd switch in a heart beat considering that they open source most of their hardware drivers now.

 

Intel just hired a bunch of the graphics people from 3D Labs (who are now doing media processors, like video rendering accelerator stuff) from what I hear, so their new chips should hopefully be better (3DLabs cards were freakin' fast, even if their drivers were dodgy), and as NVIDIA is forced to get more in bed with Intel, hopefully they'll be influenced to open things up more. It'll be an interesting next few years because of this ATI/AMD merger.

 

What is the WLAN chip? If it's broadcom, you'll have to deal with ndiswrapper. If it's Atheros, it should work with the madwifi driver. The partitioning can be done with tools available on at least Ubuntu's install CD (gparted). I don't know about PCLinuxOS's installer, as I have found Kubuntu is the best fit for what I want.

 

I just bought a Toshiba A130, Core2Duo, 1GB Ram, Bluetooth, Wireless, GeForce 7600 go. Installed Ubuntu 6.10 had the OS installed and Beryl up and running within 2 hours. There is a script called envy that installed the nvidia drivers with no trouble at all. Touchpad, media buttons, and suspend worked out of the box.

The only problem I have is a problem with the ALSA driver so no sound after suspend but everything else is working. Finally I can't get Gnomebaker to burn a disk without issue but that has something to do with a bug in cdrecord as far as I can tell.

This is the 2nd Toshiba laptop I've owned and the first one faired just as well. Considering that was five years ago and I was running Red Hat 6 (i think).

 

I have an Asus A8JS (bought about 6 months ago) with the Core Duo T7200 CPU. This will indeed run 64 bit linux. Also you can install and run 32 bit software in the 64 bin environment such as the 32 bit Flash player. I did this on the Sabayon X64 distro. Also I have the Nvidia Go 7700 with 512 MB VRAM works very nicely for games and Beryl.

 

Well, stuff will work (as in x64 Windows), but not everything (as in x64 Windows). I hope 64-bit takes off in a year or so, but it's just not ready right now. Windows is a large part to blame for this since even with Vista they've failed to really push 64-bit, but really it's just hard to switch right now. Although, it must be admitted that Apple has done this extremely well.

 

I'm running Unbutun on my new Inspiron 6400. Only trouble is I can't figure how to make my wireless work.

 

Depends on your wireless card. If you got the Intel card, it should just work, just install knetworkmanager/network-manager. If you got the Dell card (probably a broadcom chip, aka a piece of steaming cow dung), then you'll have to look into using ndiswrapper.

 

Would you avoid laptops with ati cards all together then and specifically look for one with nvidia?

 

Well, if say, the choice was between an ATi X1400, and an nVidia 7400, I'd be inclined to swing nVidia's way. However, I'd still take a X1600 over a 7400.

If the Windows performance between your options is comparable, go nVidia.

 

Success here !!!

I just bought a new Dell Inspiron E1705 (Core 2 Duo T7200, Nvidia 7900 GS, 2GB RAM) a couple of weeks ago, and installed 64-bit Ubuntu on it (fiesty release).

Like some people said, for the wireless you'll need ndiswrapper if your laptop uses the broadcom chip (like mine), but that's pretty simple.

Nvidia updates their linux drivers almost as much as their windows drivers, so I installed the latest ones (and even got the 3D desktop env working with all the effects). Quake4 runs great on this machine.

Regarding 64-bit, it does run faster, usually only around 10%, but more in some apps (like DB servers which most likely you won't run on a laptop). Most software is avaliable in 64-bit, but not everything, especially non-free software like flash. The workaround for that is to run the 32-bit version of the application, which is possible even if your OS is 64-bit. That's what I do with firefox, I'm running the 32-bit firefox with the flash plugin. Again, that's also quite easy to do - there are simple howto's in the ubuntu wiki.