Docs/Hardware/Laptops

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Hardware: Laptop Compatibility

What laptops work well and which ones do not?


Contents

[hide]

[edit] Acer

[edit] 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)


[edit] Acer Travelmate 290Lci


[edit] 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.


[edit] Aopen

[edit] 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


[edit] Compaq/HP

[edit] 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.


[edit] 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!


[edit] 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.


[edit] Dell

[edit] Dell Inspiron 8500

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


[edit] Gateway

[edit] 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.


[edit] IBM

[edit] 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.


[edit] Sony

[edit] 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.


[edit] Toshiba

[edit] Satellite Pro 4300 series


[edit] Laptop Issues

[edit] 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


[edit] Useful Links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Hardware/Laptops"
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