Some Linux Questions (SSD,TRIM,ETC.)

Hello,

As you can no doubt tell I'm new to the whole Linux thing. I just have some quick questions that I can't seem to find good answers on.

1) I would be putting it on a SSD that supports TRIM in Windows 7. Is there TRIM in Linux or like program for the SSD?

2) Battery life. How is it with the latest versions? I can only seem to find data of battery life from 2007 or so. Say I get 5 hours of battery life on Balanced Power Mode in Windows 7, what would I expect for battery life using Linux. (Any information about tweaks if needed are welcome.)

The laptop would be on my netbook which I currently don't have. (x100e) If anyone wants to make a suggestion as to what version I should get and what would be best for light use, by all means tell me.

Thanks in advance.

~350

 

Hey. If you are new to linux then no question is going to be "quick" But I have 20 minutes, so...

TRIM support is specific to both manufacturers and filesystems. If you say "Windows 7" I say NTFS. If you say linux, I say there's 3-4 different filesystems that are common and 20+ that are less common. Right now only a couple support TRIM, ext4 and btrfs both support it, but you have to work at it. Any journalling filesystem will need to be "taught" about TRIM and it's basically not ready for primetime. Most manufacturers provide tools to manually TRIM, perhaps using a system tool called hdparm (this is what OCZ is currently doing). Chance are there will be some way.

Battery, it's really up to you. linux is just as efficient as any other OS with respect to power management, but of course being linux, it's totally customisable and prone to humans. What I mean is, if you have it set to the ondemand governor and then set up a fancy OpenGL screensaver, yes your battery will be dead when you walk away and think your computer is "idle".

As to what distro, this really depends on you. If you are not technical and want computers to "just work" then you definitely want Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. Auto-everything. And they have GUI tools for nearly everything. Say you want to setup a samba server so your other Windows laptop can connect, normally this is done with editing a few/many files in a text editor and starting a daemon, but these distros provide graphical tools that run inside GNOME and KDE to automate this stuff.

Please understand that linux is not like this! This is what these distros are doing to ease people over into linux, these types of tools will be different on every distro. (for example, Fedora uses "system-config-blahblahblah", which only exists on their systems.) I would still suggest a distro like Fedora or Ubuntu or openSUSE if you are technically inclined, simply because you're new to linux, and these distros will let you use them without needing to know C, Perl, bash scripting, etc. just to use the machine.

It's a serious commitment, linux. It takes many people months to decide, and years to get proficient. You're not going to know how to do the most basic of things at first, and if you get frustrated easily - well, it can be stressful.

My best advice is do get a bunch of blank media, DVDs or ~4G thumb drives (they're so cheap these days.) and put various live distros on them. Boot between all of them when you have free time and see how it goes.

If if were me and I was putting linux on an outdated machine or a baby netbook with an Atom processor, it'd probably be self-compiled mini distro like puppy, but that's me. Everyone will have an opinion, and there's nearly as many distros as opinions. For example, you see that many people run Ubuntu, whereas I won't touch a canonical system unless I have to. Why? Why indeed!

Just remember that linux is to computing as golfing is to free time.

 

Thank you for your very informative reply NV4TEHWIN. I should have stated that this won't be the primary OS and I wanted to try one out to play around with.(If I find that Linux is useful enough, it will become the primary OS) I just don't want to get awful battery life and ruin the performance of my SSD.

I have tried Ubuntu it was straight forward and easy to use. It will be difficult to know which one will be best until I get my laptop and can start testing it out.

 

Two words: Do it! try something from the top 6 list at DistroWatch.com and see what you like. Some are more 'intuitive' than others

 

I'm pretty sure that TRIM is supported by ext4 and btrfs file systems.

Just set screen brightness to 30% and CPU governor to ondemand while on battery and you should be fine. There is a tool called powertop which will tell you details about power usage.

 

TRIM works fine on 2.6.33 Kernels, onward it is included. It's also backported into RHEL 2.6.32-series. So EXT4 and BTRFS are good to go.

hdparm is the utility you use to check and see if TRIM is supported in your kernel:
$hdparm -I /dev/sda(b,c,d) | more

If it does support trim you will see a * next to the TRIM entry.

you can then safely add "discard" to all ext4 partitions in /etc/fstab, I also use "noatime"
Before

After

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Linux is fine on the battery, but remember Lenovo makes a specific driver to interface with windows in respect to power management and to the best of my knowledge has not done so for the Unix world. Unless it was for Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop - SLED

On my R61 I get 5 hours on Windows and about 4.5 on linux - with no tweaks

 

Thanks for help and information. (I was just about to ask if there was a way to check if TRIM was enabled )

I've been trying Ubuntu Netbook Edition on my older T61 and it seems decent on battery. Now all I need to do is wait for my netbook and SSD to get here so I can start testing different Linux distros.

Thanks again.

 

hdparm -I /dev/sda (or sdb or sdc)

 

Whoops! fixed