I'm distro hopping, please advice (T61)

Hi there all. I am a long time Linux user (almost 10 years), though I do not consider myself an expert by any means. I started with a floppy disk install of Slackware. From there I moved to RedHat, Mardrake, Vector, SUSE, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Mepis, and finally PCLinuxOS. I really love PCLinuxOS and have enjoyed it for over a year. It is not coming off of my desktop machine for sure, but I have just acquired a very nice ThinkPad T61, with the Intel GMA X3100 and I just know that the distro is not ready to support it with its usual polish. I am certain it will eventually, but in the mean time I thought it may be a good opportunity to do some distro hopping and see how the rest of the Linux distros are doing, especially in regards to supporting my hardware.

I realize that this particular hardware is still quite new, but I know that a lot of work has already been done upstream that may not have yet worked its way to all the distros, if any. So, let me emphasize this, I am looking for the distro that will best support my hardware, hopefully "out of the box" or with minimal work on my part. (While I enjoy tinkering, I don't have much time for it these days.) So, if you think you have a champ that you can recommend to me in good conscience, by all means lets hear about it.

These are the specs of my machine:

T61 ThinkPad:

- Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7250 (2.0GHz 800MHz 2MBL2)

- XP Pro (partition already shrunk to 40 GB, planing on deleting the R&R partition since I already made CD set.)

- 15.4 WSXGA+ TFT

- Intel GMA X3100 GM965

- 2 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz SODIMM Memory (2 DIMM)

- 160GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm

- No Turbo Memory hard drive cache

- CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo

- PC Card Slot & Express Card Slot

- Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG

- No Bluetooth

- 9 cell Li-Ion Battery

 

Well, in terms of hardware support, usually the newer, the better, so I'd try out the most recently released distributions. Off the top of my head, I know that Fedora 8 was released yesterday and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) was released about three weeks ago. You might check out distrowatch.com to find others. Good luck and let us know if you find one that works well.

 

What you say makes sense. However, Fedora scares me. I get the feeling that it is a tinkerer oriented distro.

See this review for example. Problems right off the bat:
http://lunapark6.com/fedora-8-review.html

I am really not interested in spending hours online trying to get it to work. I guess I have been spoiled by PCLOS.

As for Ubuntu, I guess I might as well give it a try. I am just dreading the spartan style of Gnome's lack of configurability. I used to run both desktops until Gnome tried forcing everyone to open a new window per directory on its file manager. I believe they finally gave in and offered an option to configure this, but what about things like not being able to rename folders in the File Save/Open dialog box? It just gives me a bad feeling. Like I am being forced to do things a certain way. Then again, maybe there are new benefits that outweigh this, so I'll give it another go. I will let you know how it goes.

 

Try Kubuntu then. All the goodness of Ubuntu, with a more functional KDE wrapper.

 

I suggest giving Frugalware a try. I plan it as soon as I get a chance.

 

My last experience with Kubuntu was that it was not as polished as Ubuntu, like it was a step child of sorts. But, I will try it as well.

 

Is there any reason to think that it would work with the T61 better than other distros?

 

It is a distro that is known for it's support of current tech, and has a more bleeding edge version available. It seems to have many of the strengths of Slack and Arch, but easier to work with. I suggest giving it a try and reporting back to let us know how it works out for you!

 

You could also try OpenSUSE 10.3. I use that on my T61 and it works like a charm (and I didn't even have to configure anything, seriously, even my Intel Wireless 4965 works just fine).

 

Personally I've turned away from SUSE since M$ has gotten in on it.

 

I distro hop a lot myself and always end up back to good ol Ubuntu.

 

OpenSUSE is a good distro overall with good hardware detection but the main problem is its slowness in every aspect (+I have had a lot of problems with RPM packages)

 

Yes SUSE has its strengths. I was a SUSE user during the 9.2 - 10.1 versions. After 10.1 I became frustrated with its package manager. I mean Yast was slow, but at least it would work for the most part. However, once they started adding that other update manager (I forgot its name) things just wouldn't even work any more. In a way I am grateful that they drove me away at the time so that I didn't get as upset to see them stab the community in the back with that deal the made. So, I think SUSE is one I will pass on.

 

Give Frugalware a try. It's a lesser known distro, but from all of the research I've done it appears to be among the best available in many respects, particularly package management.

 

I will give it a try for sure. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

NP, glad to help.

I don't have a usable system to load Linux on right now, but as soon as I'm able, Frugalware will be the first to be loaded. Like I said, I've done a lot of research, and to me, Frugalware came out on top.

Let us know how it works out, k?

 

I am sorry to say that Frugalware did not work out so well. There were several problems with the installation. I tried my best without going beyond the intention of this test, which is to find the most trouble free Linux distribution for my hardware. I will give a much more detailed account of how it went when I finish going through all the distros that have been recommended to me. I will do a full writeup about my experiences.

For now, I am typing this message from the Ubuntu live CD as it is being installed. We'll see how this one goes.

 

I don't think there is any distro that surpasses the *buntus for hardware compatibility; this may be a weaker point of Frugalware. Thanks for letting us know. I plan on giving Frugalware a shot when I get my new notebook soon. I don't mind having to do some work to get it to work, we'll just have to see how much work it may be, and I'll let you all know once I do.

 

Ubuntu did fine in many respects. Sound worked right of the bat. It also correctly identified the optimal resolution for my display without any intervention on my part. Unfortunately, it only was able to use the generic Vesa driver for the display. So, I was not able to enable the Compiz-Fusion effects. Only Mandriva has been able to do that so far. But, I still have a few other distros to try.

 

Thanks again for your continued updates, they are very helpful to a lot of people, myself included, keep 'em comin', thanks!

 

I'm suggesting just for the heck of it, but maybe try Sabayon?

http://www.sabayonlinux.org/

 

I have heard good things about Sabayon before. I seem to remember that it's claim to fame was that it was one of the first distros to ship a somewhat stable implementation of Beryl. I have never heard anything to recommend it beyond that. However, you made me take a look.

Now, I hope this does not turn into a religious flame fest. I happen to think that the operating system one chooses has to make one feel comfortable in all respects. For me there are other considerations beyond technical excellence. That is why I moved away from Windows and why I won't use SUSE. So, what does this have to do with Sabayon?

Well, when I visited the site two things struck me. First, was the emphasis in money. There are $ signs all over that first page. Fine, a project has the right to try to support itself. I just happen to be the type that is more likely to give when I am not pushed to do so. That is one thing I like about PCLinuxOS so much, and why I have contributed financially to their distro. But really, that is a minor thing I could have just ignored.

However, the second thing that made me uncomfortable with Sabayon's web site was the logo, especially since there is an icon representing the devil on the main page. What I mean about the logo is that a long time ago someone involved in ocult practices explained to me that a chicken foot inside a circle is a stanic symbol. I happen to be a Christian, so having to look at that symbol all the time if I chose to use Sabayon would make me uncomfortable.

Now, please understand that I am not saying that Sabayon's creators are Satan worshipers or anything like that. They may or may not be. I realize that a lot of people use pagan symbols and even practice things that have their roots on pagan customs without knowing their origins. Some people don't care about their origins even after becoming informed about them. Everyone is different. I just happen to be among those that do care to stay away from those type of things. So, thanks for suggestion, but it is not for me.

 

Give Linux Mint a shot..based of ubuntu but its goal is to provide a more out of the box compatibility which it does. Detected my hardware properly except my high definition audio thing, detected my windows networks, videos and all that work without any codec installations, looks great, menus are very well organized.

Its just amazing to use


the newest version daryna which is still in beta is based of gutsy gibbon, this is the one I have and so far have had no problems besides the hda sound which is a problem for me in every distribution

 

OK, that does it! Now you've really crossed the line with me!



But in a good way!

I share your faith and concerns, and some may think it's silly, but they just don't understand. I've been considering FreeBSD lately, but that "cute" little devil has been bugging me a bit to be honest with you. Satan and devils are not funny to me, nor are they in any way cute at all, but rather they are quite the opposite.

I was struck by the $ in my face mentality of the Sabayon site as well, and M$ having "touched" OpenSUSE has tuned me completely off from it too.

Did you notice the devil icon for the "feel" description on the Sabayon page?

I found this definition link at dictionary.com. This may be the meaning, but who knows, perhaps there is a dark agenda actually behind it,

"za·ba·glio·ne (zä'bəl-yō'nē, -bäl-yō'ně Pronunciation Key
n. A dessert or sauce consisting of egg yolks, sugar, and wine or liqueur beaten until thick and served hot or cold. Also called sabayon."

Again, I'm with you on being cautious and alert,

“Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves."
Matthew 10:16 (NKJV)

 

Yes, Mint is definitely on my list of distros to test. But, I am waiting until Daryna is out of Beta and available on CD. I don't have a DVD burner. I probably should have ordered one. But, with the advent of huge USB thumb drives I didn't think I would need it. I failed to consider DVD only releases of Linux.

 

Ah. I never thought of it the way scooberdoober and rm2 did. Thanks for the insight.

I hope I didn't bother you, rm2, by recommending it

 

Of course not. As I said, I understand that people feel differently about things like this. Like you, most people never even think about them. Thanks for understanding and for your good intentions in recommending it.

Now, I just finished downloading Fedora and Debian. I am curious to see how those will work.

 

Fedora 8?
.

 

Yes, I downloaded Fedora 8 Live CD KDE edition.

 

Let us know how that goes =]

 

Amol is cool people!

 

Alright, I tested Fedora, and I am very impressed by it. There is a lot to like in it. Wow, I never thought I would like another desktop coming from the Red Hat umbrella. But, they have shown themselves to be loyal to the FOSS world and the least I could do was try their offering.

The little writeup I am doing has turned into a book! Well, almost. It is now 9 pages long in OOo. So, I don't know what I'm going to do with it. Who is going to want to publish such a huge writeup? To give you a taste, and since there seems to be some interest in Fedora here, I am going to post the section on Fedora as a reply to this message. (I hope it doesn't exceed the number of words limit. Here it goes!

PS: Let me know what you think.

 

Sounds good; looking forward to it!

 

Installing Fedora 8:
From my experience with trying Ubuntu, I could see that I had better stick with KDE for now until I become more familiar with GNOME. So, I decided to give Fedora KDE a try. The Live CD booted just fine and automatically configured my screen correctly. The theme is very good looking. I think they were aiming for the GNOME look, which is fine by me. It also correctly setup my DSL connection without any intervention on my part. I double clicked on one of my .ogg files and Amarok played it with no problems! But of course, as was to be expected, MP3 files could not play. This is not a big issue for me since I always rip my CDs to ogg format any way. But, I wish flash movies could play by default. Isn't there an open source flash player? Oh well.

I clicked on the “Install to Hard Drive” button and a nice looking installer popped up. For the “partitioning layout” I selected “Create custom layout” from the drop down list of options. I then clicked on the “Advanced storage configuration”. It gave the option of adding a drive. However, it seems that that option is for the benefit of zSeries machines accessing SCSI devices through Fiber Channel. (?) Alright, I canceled out of that. Instead, I clicked Next. That took me to a screen that displayed the existing partitions of the drives connected to my computer. I selected sda9, the partition I had used for Kubuntu, clicked the Edit button, selected / as the mount point from the very functional Mount Point drop down box, and told it to format it as ext3. I left everything else the same. The next screen was about the Boot loader (Hint for Ubuntu: this is a good thing). The screen shows the operating systems detected to be added to the Grub menu list. In this case it evidently only found: “Other - /dev/sda1” (in other words, Windows), and Fedora. However, a button is provided to add other operating systems not automatically detected. Very nice idea. Adding PclinuxOS just for kicks was a snap. Thank you. On the other hand the options for where to install Grub were either on /dev/sda (the boot sector) or not at all. However, a little check box was available to “Configure advanced boot loader options”. Maybe that would allow me to specify the root of sda9 as the location for Grub. Sure enough, after clicking Next I was able to specify “/dev/sda9 First sector of boot partition” as the location for installing the boot loader. Woohooo! At this point other “general kernel parameters” could be given. I decided to leave it alone and see how it went.

The next few screens were your basic stuff, networking, time zone, root password, and that was it. After a few minutes the installation was all done. Interestingly, the shutdown button would not work. It would just not do anything at all when clicked. So, I opened a terminal and entered the reboot command. (Strange! Hopefully this is just a problem in the Live CD.) After replacing Kubuntu's entries in the boot menu list Fedora booted just fine (and I like that they give you a “Details” button to see what is happening. (Fedora does many things right!)

Upon booting for the first time, the license, GPL2, is mentioned. Good! Then, a series of screens allow one to configure the Firewall (excellent!), SELinux (I don't know, but I'll try it.), the date and time, whether to send your hardware profile to the Fedora Project or not, and your User account. After that you are ready to go. On the login screen there was a message welcoming to “local.host”, and that message was overlapping with the clock. That looked a little messy. So, I decided that my first task would be to change the name of my machine. However, a message indicating that there were 32 updates available took precedence. The updates were very slow. So, I got them going and took a look around.

The host name was easily changed under Settings > Network > DNS. I had already noticed that the Fedora team had chosen to use Konqueror as the default Web browser instead of Firefox, but I was even more surprised to see that OpenOffice.org had been left out in favor of KOffice. I like KOffice, but I want to wait until they offer full compatibility with ODF before trusting it to save my data. Oh well, I hope their repositories are not always as slow as they were for those updates.

What about display settings? Well, as I said, the proper resolution was automatically detected. The graphics card was correctly identified and it was automatically configured to use the “intel – Experimental modesetting driver for Intel integrated graphics chipsets”. So it uses the right driver! I looked through all the menus, and could not find any mention of Compiz-Fusion or anything related. So, I cheated a bit and went to the web. I found this page:

http://blog.kagesenshi.org/2007/11/howto-compiz-fusion-in-fedora-8.html

It appeared to say that as long as my hardware was already configured to be able to run Compiz-Fusion (which it was, apparently) it wouldn't be hard to enable it. I would have to install the compiz-fusion components and then do some manual configurations. Was it worth it? Well, I would have to think about it. In the mean time, the updates finished and I had to reboot. After rebooting I decided to give it a go since I had the instructions handy and they didn't look too hard. And frankly, I had already liked so many things about Fedora at this point that giving up so easy did not seem right. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Probably because of the black listing of the Intel card.

After going through those instructions and seeing how yum worked from the command line, I decided to try installing Firefox that way. So, as root, I entered:

yum install firefox

And, bingo (well actually after several minutes), Firefox was installed and ready to go. I think I'd like to get to know Fedora a little bit more in depth. It is a keeper!

 

Thanks for the great little review!

 

Oh wow. Now I'm tempted to try Fedora haha =P Please keep up the good work, I'd love updates =]

 

Interestingly, I decided to verify if the reason Compiz-Fusion didn't work for me on Fedora was due to my graphics chip being blacklisted by Compiz, as I know it has. However, when I looked in "/usr/bin/compiz-manager", I see that Fedora has commented out "intel 965" from the black list. So, I guess it should have worked. I may just have to pay my first visit to the Fedora forums to see if I can get some help over there.

 

Let us know how well the forums work out for you.

 

I'm trying out Sabayon now.... I believe those in some quarters used to say that same thing about (re: the devil) the 60's Peace Symbol. To me it means something to do with 'eggs' and the desert, Sabayon. The chicken foot is not in a circle on startup, and on the desktop it's in an 'orb', not a circle anyway...don't want any rumors to get started lol

Interesting it's the 5th most downloaded at Distrowatch.

 

I have a t61, and am running ubuntu on it. Everything works except hibernate/suspend, which I am working on.

http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

has a ton of stuff on how to get linux working on a t61

 

Well, if you can get it to connect to a WPA2 encrypted wireless access point I would love to hear how you did it. On my T61, Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu 7.10) is the only one that I can't connect at work, as mentioned on my follow up writeup:

http://temporaryland.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/finding-the-right-distro-for-my-thinkpad-followup/

 

Give SimplyMEPIS a try.

 

I just might do that, once the final version comes out.

 

I'm running 7 rc2 right now on my old desktop, and it works perfectly. It's my favorite distro so far. It's very logically configured, and it just plain works. Hopefully the experience will carry over to a notebook.

 

I'm distro hopping myself....never tried a Gentoo variety, hence Sabayon....it's pretty cool I must say. I have the Mint ISO also. I'll check out MEPIS also.

 

If you try MEPIS, get the latest 7.x release. I'm interested to see how it works out for you.

 

In the Acer, I have an X700 ATI card....any advice for this card?

 

I have yet to run Linux on a notebook, and from what I can tell, video drivers for mobile GPUs are a rather dicey proposition, especially for ATI. Some people are claiming that you can use the latest Catalyst 7.x drivers with ENVY, or by your own configuration, but there are conflicting reports on this. This is the dilemma I'm now facing as I prepare to run Linux on my new HP 8510p, which has an ATI Radeon Mobility HD 2600 GPU.

I know that ATI is supposed to be developing a driver that supports it's more current mobile GPUs in Linux, and there is also a third party project under way being sponsored by Novell. Here's a link, http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd. But it's still very immature, and they are awaiting more info to be released to the open source community from AMD to complete it.

While things are still dicey right now, I think they will finally be getting much better very soon, at least I hope so.

 

What about Ultimate Edition former--Ubuntu ultimate edition... It's got everything...and i mean everything, search it on google n you will find it.

 

I just wiped Vista and installed 32-bit Kubuntu 7.10 on a T61. Over past 9 years I've used Redhat, Fedora, and Kubuntu, and have Kubuntu 6.10 on my T41. This was my smoothest linux install yet (and 6.10 was smoothest at that time). Only change so far was to turn on BIOS SATA compatibility mode. Volume buttons don't work as expected. Brightness buttons don't work at all. Everything else appears good so far: hibernate, suspend, webcam, sound, resolution, vpnc, wireless, audio cds, skype... still need to test wine usage, verizon air card, samba, parallels, samba, etc. I am uncertain whether any 64-bit performance gains are worth the time/effort to get the 64-bit OS going.

I heard raves about PCLinuxOS and tried installing on a 5-yr-old Compaq desktop; the installation fatally failed with no resolution in sight (at least that I have time to look for). Perhaps my hardware problem, dunno.