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    Linux friendly?

    Discussion in 'Sager and Clevo' started by adamthezeek, May 14, 2012.

  1. adamthezeek

    adamthezeek Notebook Enthusiast

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    How friendly are these laptops to Linux, like Debian based.

    I like these, but I need/want linux for school/work of course it will be dual boot with Win7 for that odd game or two, but my main purpose is linux.

    Looking at the NP9150. Ideas?
     
    adamthezeek, May 14, 2012
    #1
  2. Prasad

    Prasad NBR Reviewer 1337 NBR Reviewer

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    I doubt the laptop itself has much to do with Linux support. I'm getting the NP9150 myself and will be working on Fedora extensively. It has more to do with individual hardware components in any laptop, regardless of the brand. As far as your question is concerned, the most important thing to look out for is that ATI cards have very poor proprietary driver support on GNOME 3, which is what Fedora 16 uses by default. Fortunately, the open source ATI drivers more than suffice! :) So, if that happens to be a major concern, go with an nVidia GPU.
     
    Prasad, May 14, 2012
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  3. sha7bot

    sha7bot Company Representative

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    I would most definitely get the AMD 7970M as nVIDIA optimus does not work in any Linux distro. Do as Prasad says and get the open source drivers, and AVOID OPTIMUS!
     
    sha7bot, May 14, 2012
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  4. adamthezeek

    adamthezeek Notebook Enthusiast

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    Yeah I was thinking of avoiding Optimus, but I would love to stay around at least 4 hours of battery, that huge video card will chew me alive. Are there slice batteries for Clevo?
     
    adamthezeek, May 14, 2012
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  5. sha7bot

    sha7bot Company Representative

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    With AMDs ZeroCore, Enduro, and PowerTune technologies they are very power efficient.

    Your largest battery consumers will be WiFi/Bluetooth and your screen. Turn those off/down and you might pull 4 hours out of it.

    Enduro is nearly identical to Optimus. It just works in Linux.
     
    sha7bot, May 14, 2012
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  6. XMG

    XMG Company Representative

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    No Linux/Optimus thread without hinting to Bumblebee.
    https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ

    While this is far from native support, it works. It's just not so well integrated an you need to know some fallacies if you want to play games on Linux with NVIDIA.

    There has been an amazingly well researched article in the renowned german computer magazine c't:
    https://www.heise.de/artikel-archiv/ct/2012/8/184

    I don't know whether there is any English article out there right now that comes close to that, but anyway. AMD is good choice, but NV works, too.

    Another thing:
    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/W150HRM

    Apparantly no one ever got the brightness controls to work on the W150HRM. :(
     
    XMG, May 14, 2012
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  7. XMG

    XMG Company Representative

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    XMG, May 15, 2012
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  8. Hubmaster

    Hubmaster Notebook Enthusiast

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    I was originally going to go team green for Optimus but team red seems to have got their act together. :D
     
    Hubmaster, May 16, 2012
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