Laptop Compatibility

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What laptops work well and which ones do not?

Contents

Acer

Aspire 1304LC

  • Mandriva 9.2 (& 9.1) ACPI power control for power saving still not performing. Battery Life was 3hrs with WindowsXP Pro not so with 9.2.
  • More: try this site : http://www.nervous.it/hw/linux_aspire1300xv.html Froody! (He's a Debian geek though. It's a good guide)


Acer Travelmate 290Lci


Acer Aspire 1350 Series

  • My experience, limited as it is:
    • Comes with Windows XP home edition and a backup partition. Erased entire hard drive and loaded Mandriva Linux 9.2 and it worked well, however without the kernel source, on dial up I could not get the modem to work.
    • Installed XP again from CD's supplied with lappy to access the internet. Then installed Mandriva Linux 10 with the 2.4.25-2mdk kernel. The machine locked at the same place, the touchpad mouse every time an attempt was made to install with the 2.6 kernel after a warning that some proprietary drivers would be required for the system to work. This was also the case with the 2.4.25-2mdk kernel, but it moved on and installed without a hitch.
  • Major Mistake
    • Didn't check to see if there was a serial port, and there wasn't. read on.
    • Due to lack of knowledge probably, was unable to make the winmodem work. So decided to get a PCMICA card modem:- "D-Link", "DM-560 V.90 56K Fax+Modem" So far this modem works but does not connect to my ISP. That work is ongoing. But until it allows me access to the net. It will need to remain a dual boot machine.
    • Fam had to be stopped from running because it held the CD/RW/DVD/R and wouldn't allow it to umount.
    • Battery power management does not work. Save Often.


Acer Aspire 1810TZ Timeline

  • Mandriva 2010 powerpack was installed without problems on a shared partition.
  • Installation was from a USB dvd drive.
  • Everything I have used has worked since, including the wireless networking. I have not looked at some things such as battery management, since battery life has been good enough for me not to worry about it.
  • This machine comes with Windows 7 installed on a 250Gb disk, which was shrunk (with Windows tools) into half the available space.

Aopen

Aopen 1556

  • Mandriva 2006 RC1 installs perfectly. Graphics, Ethernet, PCMCIA, work "Out of the box".
  • Sound worked but needed more configuration to enable two audio streams to play at once.
  • Suspend to disc works fine, suspend to RAM doesn't.
  • Full details at http://www.jennings.homelinux.net/aopen1556.html


Compaq/HP

Presario 1700

  • This laptop works very well with 10.1. The touchpad works with no config effort. Internal modem works with the HSP driver(YMMV) I had no problems with the pmcia ethernet card set up (used Linksys). Overall it makes the 600mhz celeron work like a 1 gighz pentium.


Presario 2100

  • I've installed 9.2 on this with fairly small effort. Most thing worked first time except pcmcia and expecially my pcmcia wireless card (Cisco Aironet). However with a bit of fiddling I've now got that work, but I had to disable the built in "wired" network adaptor, but then that's OK if it gives me wireless!!! ;o)
  • The big problem I've found is that the Presario only support ACPI power management and Mandriva Linux 9.2 doesn't really do that yet, it only support APM which the Presario doesn't!!! I'm told I need to rebuild the Kernel (2.4 currently) however, as a Linux newbie i think I'll pass on that and wait until there's a stable Mandriva 10 as I believe that has better ACPI support. This is quite a big problem for a laptop as you have no idea how much battery you've got left and it doesn't suspend when the battery goes, it just dies!!!!! Here's hoping on 10!


Presario R3000

  • Works quite well with Mandriva Linux 10.0/amd64 and 10.1/x86_64, including battery support, etc. Everything except for the wireless nic works and this because it's a Broadcom driver and the ndiswrapper software won't work with it (64bit OS using 32bit windows drivers doesn't work too well). The nvidia drivers need to be compiled manually, but no biggy. Everything else works quite nice. This is an awesome AMD64 laptop.


Dell

Dell Inspiron 8500

  • Works quite good and stable. Some problems with DMA are reported, but they can be solved.

Dell Vostro 1510

  • Works quite well (including fingerprint sensor), but you have to use binary wl driver for Broadcom 802.11n wifi. Sound is quirky sometimes but latest drivers from ALSA git solves it. Kernels >=2.6.29.3 should have no sound problems.

Dell Latitude D620 and D820

  • Works good and stable with 2010 and 2010 Spring.


Gateway

Gateway SOLO 1200

  • With Mandriva Linux 9.1 I had no problems installing the distro. It runs fine with no known problems. This is a Celeron 850Mhz with a Digital Flat Panel of 1024x768. The modem is a winmodem so I did get a Zoom PCMCIA modem card that works great.


IBM

Thinkpad T41

  • I have Mandriva Linux 9.2 installed and working quite well on an IBM Thinkpad T41 model 2379-DJU. ACPI is not quite there yet, but it works very well under APM. I have detailed notes available here).

Lenovo Ideapad U450p

  • Had one problem starting the 10.1 installation, but a quick configuration in the terminal fixed the issue (review the solution here).
  • The installation finished smoothly and everything worked out of the box (network, webcamera, buttons, speakers), except the sound which I got working by disabling the PulseAudio.

Sony

Sony Vaio PCG-SRX51P/A

  • Mostly works well and stable with straight install of Mandriva 9.0. Problem: power management, brightness and volume function keys don't work - need to drop into XP to check or adjust these - still investigating workarounds.


Toshiba

Satellite Pro 4300 series


MSI

Megabook GX720

I've installed Mandriva 9.1 without any problems. Everything works well except two things.

  • The first problem I encountered was the driver to my wireless network card (Intel WiFi Link 5100). I fixed it by downloading the 5000 Image from http://www.intellinuxwireless.org
  • The second problem which I haven't solved yet is the sound quality - still investigating the problem.
    • The audio is only playing through the speaker below the laptop
    • When using earphones the sound is perfect. However, the speaker below though isn't muted

System76

Gazelle Value

  • Successfully installed Mandriva 2009 Spring.
  • I'm having issues with suspend and hibernate which I am still troubleshooting.
  • To get the sound card (Intel Corporation|82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller) working add the following options to modprobe: 
options snd_hda_intel model=laptop
  • Detects Intel 810 graphics and sets to highest resolution 1280x800 24bpp

Serval Performance(serp4)

  • Successfully installed Mandriva 2009 Spring.
  • Had to put these in the grub menu to get all hardware working. psmouse gets the touchpad working and clocksource to keep system from stalling. 
    • clocksource=jiffies psmouse.proto=imps
  • Everything else seems to work okay.

Laptop Issues

Laptop Mode in Mandriva Linux 10.1

Unlike most startup scripts, this one resides in /sbin, you can start it manually with /sbin/laptop-mode start

You can configure it using /etc/sysconfig/laptop

But it doesn't seem to change the cpufreq on my laptop, with the following CPU. 

cpu family      : 15
model           : 2
model name      : Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 1.80GHz

apparently, you can program this CPU using the /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor file.

I can change the CPU frequency by echoing "powersave" or "performance" to this file. This should probably be added to the suspend-scripts stuff...

Other packages that manage the CPU frequency are: cpufreqd and cpudyn

Useful Links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Laptop_Compatibility"
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