Hi you all,

I am going to buy a laptop and install debian on it, so I would like to
receive some feedback/suggestions from the list in this sense.

thanx in advance

Raffaele Morelli(raffaele.morelli@gmail.com) is reported to have said:
> Hi you all,
>
> I am going to buy a laptop and install debian on it, so I would like to
> receive some feedback/suggestions from the list in this sense.
>
> thanx in advance

1. IBM Thinkpad
2. Lenovo Thinkpad

WT

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a test load.
__________________________________________________ _____


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Get a Toshiba / Asus.. :P

On 11/09/2007, Wayne Topa <linuxone@intergate.com> wrote:
>
> Raffaele Morelli(raffaele.morelli@gmail.com) is reported to have said:
> > Hi you all,
> >
> > I am going to buy a laptop and install debian on it, so I would like to
> > receive some feedback/suggestions from the list in this sense.
> >
> > thanx in advance
>
> 1. IBM Thinkpad
> 2. Lenovo Thinkpad
>
> WT
>
> --
> To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide
> a test load.
> __________________________________________________ _____
>
>
> --
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>


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André César de Sá

On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 16:34 +0100, André César de Sá wrote:
> Get a Toshiba / Asus.. :P

I've been using Debian on a Toshiba M105-S3074 for nearly a year now and
it runs great, despite all the talk about Toshiba ignoring Linux. As
long as the hardware inside is not exotic, having official vendor's
support is not so important. Here most things work out-of-the-box with
standard drivers, and those that do not - usually minor gagdets - can be
made to work with "unofficial" drivers. For anyone having doubts:

* the GPU is Intel's 945GM Express, works pretty well with
i810/intel X.Org driver (3D acceleration included); I've also
successfully tested the VGA output, which needs no configuration
to "just work"
* the sound chip is Intel HDA Controller -> standard ALSA
snd_intel_hda driver module
* touchpad is made by ALPS - supported by X.Org's synaptic driver,
though requires some xorg.conf tweaking (default settings, which
assume a Synaptic touchpad, result in really slow cursor
movement and no tap-clicking)
* Ethernet (Intel PRO/1000) works with standard e1000 driver,
Wi-Fi (Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG) with ipw3945 (requires
non-free binary firmware, though - but runs smoothly)
* built-in Texas Instruments 5-in-1 flash card reader works with
the tifm(xx) driver - tested with SD cards
* setting LCD brightness by software works with the omnibook
module (http://omnibook.sourceforge.net/); people on some forums
report that on similar laptop models you can get this
functionality through standard kernel's ACPI video driver by
flashing Toshiba's new "Vista-only" BIOS (sic!)
* multimedia keys work with omnibook, too
* fingerprint reader (not-very-useful gadget as it is) works with
ThinkFinger driver and software
* PCMCIA seems to work, my friend's Wi-Fi card got detected once
* suspend/hibernate is tricky, though I got it working with some
combinations of kernel version and loaded modules

It may be reasonable, however, to buy a laptop with GNU/Linux
preinstalled - everything should work nice then, and you save money
you'd otherwise pay for a Windows licence. In any case, checking
http://linux-laptop.net/ for the model you want to buy can .

Regards,
--
Krzysztof Lubanski

Raffaele Morelli wrote:

> Hi you all,
>
> I am going to buy a laptop and install debian on it, so I would like to
> receive some feedback/suggestions from the list in this sense.
>
> thanx in advance

I have experience with Dell Inspiron 6400/E1505, Toshiba satellite P25-s507.
I am pretty happy with both of them. I havenot tried exotic stuff such as
suspend/resume functions. However things like wireless card, X window
system etc., work perfect.

hth
raju
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On Tue, 11 Sep 2007, Wayne Topa wrote:
> Raffaele Morelli(raffaele.morelli@gmail.com) is reported to have said:
> > I am going to buy a laptop and install debian on it, so I would like to
> > receive some feedback/suggestions from the list in this sense.
>
> 1. IBM Thinkpad
Get a R52, T42 (best of the lot), T43, X40 or X41 (non-tablet).
The T43 is the more powerful and newer of all of those, the T42
is the best thinkpad ever produced so far, IMHO. I own a T43.

> 2. Lenovo Thinkpad
Those *will* give you trouble for now. I speak this as the
maintainer for the kernel thinkpad-acpi module :-P As time passes,
we will learn enough about them to support them better.

But yes, if you can get a Thinkpad with a Brightview wide-angle-view,
non-glossy high-DPI screen, go for it. There's nothing better.

--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh


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Thanx for your replies.

After all, it seems that Thinkpad (IBM or Lenovo) is a good choice.

As suggested by Celejar I am now going to ask on debian-laptop for more
specific trouble about sound cards as my first goal is to get sound system
perfectly working.
Any other feedback about "sound system" is appreciated.

Regards
Raffaele

On 11 Sep 2007, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
>
> > 2. Lenovo Thinkpad
> Those *will* give you trouble for now. I speak this as the
> maintainer for the kernel thinkpad-acpi module :-P As time passes,
> we will learn enough about them to support them better.
>

I'd second this. I've got a Thinkpad Z61M. Very well made, but the ATI
video and the Broadcom wireless are both difficult to get going; also
the sound is a problem. They all do work but it is not fun.

Ubuntu is easier to set up than native Debian; Sidux is a good
alternative.

Anthony

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2007/9/12, Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>:
>
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 11:02:33AM +0200, Raffaele Morelli wrote:
>
> > Thanx for your replies.
> >
> > After all, it seems that Thinkpad (IBM or Lenovo) is a good choice.
> >
> > As suggested by Celejar I am now going to ask on debian-laptop for more
> > specific trouble about sound cards as my first goal is to get sound
> system
> > perfectly working.
>
> Good Luck! All my laptops have been silent.


I hope mine will not! :-)

--
> richard


raffaele

On 12 Sep 2007, Richard Lyons wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 11:02:33AM +0200, Raffaele Morelli wrote:
>
> > Thanx for your replies.
> >
> > After all, it seems that Thinkpad (IBM or Lenovo) is a good choice.
> >
> > As suggested by Celejar I am now going to ask on debian-laptop for more
> > specific trouble about sound cards as my first goal is to get sound system
> > perfectly working.
>
> Good Luck! All my laptops have been silent. But otherwise, all have
> run debian out of the box (not counting winmodems of course), old
> Thinkpads, old Dell, and even a new Acer Aspire. And the thinkpad
> keyboard puts all others in the shade.
>


As I mentioned earlier, I was not able to get sound to work with the
Thinkpad Z61M using Debian (admittedly this was nearly a year ago).
However, it does work with Sidux and Ubuntu.



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On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 11:02:33AM +0200, Raffaele Morelli wrote:

> Thanx for your replies.
>
> After all, it seems that Thinkpad (IBM or Lenovo) is a good choice.
>
> As suggested by Celejar I am now going to ask on debian-laptop for more
> specific trouble about sound cards as my first goal is to get sound system
> perfectly working.

Good Luck! All my laptops have been silent. But otherwise, all have
run debian out of the box (not counting winmodems of course), old
Thinkpads, old Dell, and even a new Acer Aspire. And the thinkpad
keyboard puts all others in the shade.

--
richard


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On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:57:38 +0100
Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 11:02:33AM +0200, Raffaele Morelli wrote:
>
> > Thanx for your replies.
> >
> > After all, it seems that Thinkpad (IBM or Lenovo) is a good choice.
> >
> > As suggested by Celejar I am now going to ask on debian-laptop for more
> > specific trouble about sound cards as my first goal is to get sound system
> > perfectly working.
>
> Good Luck! All my laptops have been silent. But otherwise, all have
> run debian out of the box (not counting winmodems of course), old
> Thinkpads, old Dell, and even a new Acer Aspire. And the thinkpad
> keyboard puts all others in the shade.

On my Acer Aspire (3690-2672), sound works out of the box. From lspci:

> 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)

Celejar
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On Sep 12, 2007, at 2:57 AM, Richard Lyons wrote:
> Good Luck! All my laptops have been silent. But otherwise, all have
> run debian out of the box (not counting winmodems of course), old
> Thinkpads, old Dell, and even a new Acer Aspire. And the thinkpad
> keyboard puts all others in the shade.

Sound works fine on my old Thinkpad T22. Although I'm not running
Debian on it, so maybe this is a difference between distros. I do
find that if I suspend/resume, sound no longer works, though.

What I really appreciate about Thinkpads, from a Linux user's
perspective, is that they have three-button mice.




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On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 10:25:33AM -0400, Celejar wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:57:38 +0100
> Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 11:02:33AM +0200, Raffaele Morelli wrote:
> >
> > > Thanx for your replies.
> > >
> > > After all, it seems that Thinkpad (IBM or Lenovo) is a good choice.
> > >
> > > As suggested by Celejar I am now going to ask on debian-laptop for more
> > > specific trouble about sound cards as my first goal is to get sound system
> > > perfectly working.
> >
> > Good Luck! All my laptops have been silent. But otherwise, all have
> > run debian out of the box (not counting winmodems of course), old
> > Thinkpads, old Dell, and even a new Acer Aspire. And the thinkpad
> > keyboard puts all others in the shade.
>
> On my Acer Aspire (3690-2672), sound works out of the box. From lspci:

That's encouraging. I must investigate further when I get back to mine
next week. What flavour of debian are you running?

--
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On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> I'd second this. I've got a Thinkpad Z61M. Very well made, but the ATI
> video and the Broadcom wireless are both difficult to get going; also
> the sound is a problem. They all do work but it is not fun.

Get Intel wireless along with any thinkpad. Always. But don't expect drivers
for less than one-year-old hardware to be fully stable and well supported,
not even Intel always manages that. This is a golden rule, and applies to
every hardware: as usual, the bleeding edge is not a wise place to be if you
are not a driver developer.

If you are lucky, the thinkpad will have proper e1000 ethernet instead of
sort-of-ok tg3 ethernet (still, the tg3 found in thinkpads are fully
supported by Linux, so it will work well anyway).

ATI is getting fixed by AMD, fortunately. Don't get one of the new thinkpad
with nVidia GPUs, go for Intel (immediate full Linux support with good open
drivers) or ATI (good drivers are about one year away).

But the thinkpad *firmware* in the new machines is still going to be trouble
for about one year at the speed I am going with thinkpad-acpi.

As for the sound, it is just the usual problem with very new hardware, and
it has already been fixed upstream in ALSA AFAIK.

--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh


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On 13 Sep 2007, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> > I'd second this. I've got a Thinkpad Z61M. Very well made, but the ATI
> > video and the Broadcom wireless are both difficult to get going; also
> > the sound is a problem. They all do work but it is not fun.
>
> Get Intel wireless along with any thinkpad. Always. But don't expect drivers
> for less than one-year-old hardware to be fully stable and well supported,
> not even Intel always manages that. This is a golden rule, and applies to
> every hardware: as usual, the bleeding edge is not a wise place to be if you
> are not a driver developer.
>
> If you are lucky, the thinkpad will have proper e1000 ethernet instead of
> sort-of-ok tg3 ethernet (still, the tg3 found in thinkpads are fully
> supported by Linux, so it will work well anyway).
>
> ATI is getting fixed by AMD, fortunately. Don't get one of the new thinkpad
> with nVidia GPUs, go for Intel (immediate full Linux support with good open
> drivers) or ATI (good drivers are about one year away).
>
> But the thinkpad *firmware* in the new machines is still going to be trouble
> for about one year at the speed I am going with thinkpad-acpi.
>
> As for the sound, it is just the usual problem with very new hardware, and
> it has already been fixed upstream in ALSA AFAIK.
>

I made the mistake of reinstalling Sidux on my Z61M in the hope of
eliminating the unexplained NMI: 1 0 error (it didn't, but that's
another story ...) .

I now have ATI and sound working but not wireless and I'm not the only
one. I've installed firmware-iwlwifi, which is supposed to work. After
trying out all kinds of things in /etc/networking/interfaces, the best I
get is repeated failed attempts to make a connection, plus "wmaster0:
unknown hardware address type 801" (repeated twice). It's lucky that at
least the wired connection still works.

Anthony

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On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> I now have ATI and sound working but not wireless and I'm not the only
> one. I've installed firmware-iwlwifi, which is supposed to work. After

It took a while for ipw2200 to work right, I don't think iwlwifi is there
yet (unless you're using 2.6.23-rc or something like that). You could try
using the most up-to-date version possible of iwlwifi and mac80211
backported for whatever kernel version you are using. Get it from
http://intellinuxwireless.org/?p=iwlwifi

I had to keep up with the development versions of ipw2200 for a while before
it was good enough that I'd care to update only to whatever made it to Linux
mainline.

--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh


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On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 11:47:47AM +0200, Raffaele Morelli <raffaele.morelli@gmail.com> was heard to say:
> Hi you all,
>
> I am going to buy a laptop and install debian on it, so I would like to
> receive some feedback/suggestions from the list in this sense.
>
> thanx in advance

The Fujitsu P7120 works nicely with Debian. If you're planning on
using this machine as a mobile device it's great -- under 3 pounds and
gets between 6 and 10 hours of battery life depending on what I'm doing.

Daniel


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On 14 Sep 2007, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> > I now have ATI and sound working but not wireless and I'm not the only
> > one. I've installed firmware-iwlwifi, which is supposed to work. After
>
> It took a while for ipw2200 to work right, I don't think iwlwifi is there
> yet (unless you're using 2.6.23-rc or something like that). You could try
> using the most up-to-date version possible of iwlwifi and mac80211
> backported for whatever kernel version you are using. Get it from
> http://intellinuxwireless.org/?p=iwlwifi
>
> I had to keep up with the development versions of ipw2200 for a while before
> it was good enough that I'd care to update only to whatever made it to Linux
> mainline.
>

Thanks for this pointer. I had tried going back to the previous method
but that didn't work either. As I do have a wired connection I may use
that for the present until things improve.

I was wondering about ndiswrapper. Is that a possibility? I know nothing
about it.

Anthony


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On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 11:47:47AM +0200, Raffaele Morelli wrote:
> Hi you all,
> I am going to buy a laptop and install debian on it, so I would like to
> receive some feedback/suggestions from the list in this sense.
> thanx in advance

The 'debian-laptop' list is an excellent resource for this.

--
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======


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On 15 Sep 2007, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> On 14 Sep 2007, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> > > I now have ATI and sound working but not wireless and I'm not the only
> > > one. I've installed firmware-iwlwifi, which is supposed to work. After
> >
> > It took a while for ipw2200 to work right, I don't think iwlwifi is there
> > yet (unless you're using 2.6.23-rc or something like that). You could try
> > using the most up-to-date version possible of iwlwifi and mac80211
> > backported for whatever kernel version you are using. Get it from
> > http://intellinuxwireless.org/?p=iwlwifi
> >
> > I had to keep up with the development versions of ipw2200 for a while before
> > it was good enough that I'd care to update only to whatever made it to Linux
> > mainline.
> >
>
> Thanks for this pointer. I had tried going back to the previous method
> but that didn't work either. As I do have a wired connection I may use
> that for the present until things improve.
>


Following up to myself, I just installed Debian Stable and then upgraded
to Testing with everything working correctly: sound, wireless, and 3d
graphics. It was all quite painless using the old-style ipw3945 stuff.

I must say I'm extremely impressed; a big than-you to Debian developers.
When I tried back in May this year I had numerous problems, but things
seem to have come on immeasurably since then.

Anthony

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On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:01:56 +0100
Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 10:25:33AM -0400, Celejar wrote:

[snip]

> > On my Acer Aspire (3690-2672), sound works out of the box. From lspci:
>
> That's encouraging. I must investigate further when I get back to mine
> next week. What flavour of debian are you running?

Sorry for the delay; I overlooked this message in my d-u backlog. Sid;
and at least I *think* it worked out of the box; I may have forgotten
some voodoo, but I don't at present recall any frustration. Good luck
with yours!

> richard

Celejar
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