The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

Laptop installation has traditionally been one of the biggest challenges faced by Linux users. These systems come with no end of special-purpose hardware, and they bring particular needs of their own. More recently, getting a laptop into a basic, working state has become less of a challenge - at least, for carefully-chosen systems. Life has gotten much easier in this area.

But a contemporary laptop user is not content with "it boots Linux." A well-provisioned laptop in 2008 should be able to make full use of all the hardware, suspend and resume reliably, avoid turning presentations into extended projector-related hassles, and get the most out of the battery. Your editor has, in the past, proved that he could get a laptop to suspend through a sufficient investment of his life into building kernels and tweaking configurations. Your editor, in the present, has little patience for that kind of messing around. The manual creation of power management configurations should really, at this point, go the way of hand-crafting XFree86 modelines. Both were once ways of showing one's advanced Linux skills, but both are now just unnecessary pain.

A period of relatively little travel recently made it possible to follow through on an old suggestion from Arjan van de Ven: install a number of distributions on a laptop and compare how they perform. To this end, your editor's aging Thinkpad X31 was pressed into service with offerings from several distributors. In each case, a recent stable (or occasionally beta) distribution was installed while doing a minimum of work beyond clicking "next": no "expert" installations were done. All available updates were applied. Then, a number of things were checked:

• Powertop was installed (if not already present) and run to measure the steady-state power usage of the machine. The laptop was as idle as your editor could get it to be, with the backlight at minimum brightness; the system was left long enough for the power usage numbers to stabilize. The idea was to get the lowest possible value for each distribution.

• Suspend (to RAM) and hibernate (suspend to disk) were tested.

• Various laptop-specific buttons were tested. The X31, for example, has a button combination which controls a small light which illuminates the keyboard.

• The wireless network adapter was tested. The X31 presents an interesting complication in that it has an Atheros-based adapter, which, until recently, has not been supportable with free software.

• An external monitor was connected to determine how much work is required to drive an external projector.

During the process, any other events of note were recorded as well.

Late in the process of writing this article, your editor was lucky enough to receive a shiny new HP 2510p laptop, thanks to the generosity of the folks at HP (and Bdale Garbee in particular). This machine, being based on Intel chipsets, is fully supported by free software. It promises to make future travels much more pleasant; having a toy like this show up in the mail makes it hard to maintain a grumpy attitude. The above tests were run on the new machine, but only for a subset of the distributions.

Debian Lenny (unstable testing)

Your editor chose to perform this experiment with a mid-May Debian Lenny testing release, rather than the aging stable distribution. That installed a system with a 2.6.22 kernel which, of course, has no ath5k driver. So no wireless on the X31 for Debian users - at least, not without installing the proprietary MadWifi module. Unsurprisingly, the Debian installer did not offer MadWifi as an option.

Suspend works, as long as the user does not mind a corrupted display on resume; it's possible to see enough to perform an orderly reboot, but not much more. It is strange that Debian would have this problem; suspend has worked on this laptop with kernels significantly older than 2.6.22. Hibernate was not accessible via its usual place on F12, but, when invoked from the menus, worked properly. Other laptop keys worked without problem.

The external display port did not work under Debian. The only way to get video out of that port is to have the monitor plugged in when the system boots.

Power consumption on an idle system was 10.7 watts, with the system waking up an average of 67 times every second. This is far from the worst power performance your editor saw over the course of this exercise, but also far from the best.

All told, Debian Lenny in its current form is not one of the better systems for laptops - at least, for this particular laptop. Some of the other distributors have made much more progress in this area in recent years.

Fedora 9

The installation from the Fedora 9 DVD went without any significant problems. One of the nicest things about this particular distribution was its inclusion of the ath5k driver as part of its 2.6.25 kernel. It seems that ath5k does not work well for all chipsets, but the X31 wireless adapter works quite well with it. So, with Fedora 9, the X31 laptop works with 100% free software.

Another thing worthy of note: Fedora 9 was the only distribution tested which offered to install the system on an encrypted disk. Given the frequency with which laptops are lost, encrypting the data on them seems like something a lot of users would want to have.

Suspend and hibernate worked on this system, with one little glitch: the backlight remained on after the system was suspended. Your editor ran into the same problem with Ubuntu Hardy during its development cycle; after some conversation in Launchpad, the problem was quickly fixed. So a bug has been filed in the Fedora tracker pointing to that resolution, but no activity has been seen so far.

The power consumption for Fedora was 8.9 watts, with the processor waking up an average of 45 times per second. The NetworkManager applet offers a "disable wireless" operation which, indeed, will disable the wireless interface. It does not power it down, though, so power consumption is unchanged. Actually uninstalling the ath5k module dropped power consumption to 8.2 watts.

Plugging into an external display worked, though it was necessary to bring up the "screen resolution" dialog to bring up the external port.

On the 2510p, the display was run in a strange, non-native resolution during the installation, making the text harder to read. The installed system, however, did not have this problem. This system ran at 11.0 watts, with a surprising 145 wakeups per second. Following Powertop's advice, your editor shut down the Bluetooth interface and the HAL CD polling daemon, bringing power usage down to 10.1 watts. Once again, NetworkManager was unable to save any power by disabling the wireless. The hardware's wireless button did power down the interface, bringing power usage down to 8.6 watts. But (and this is true for all distributions tested), NetworkManager was never able to make use of that interface again until the system was rebooted.

All told, Fedora 9 works quite nicely for laptop installations; this distribution has made quite a bit of progress over the last few releases. Some grumpiness about the GNOME setup is appropriate, though. Fedora's hackers seem especially enamored of those dialog notifier windows which pop up from the panel icons. The experience is rather like trying to work while being heckled by a sizable crowd of unhelpful bystanders.

One window, in particular, announced that closing the lid would no longer suspend the system because some (unnamed) program was blocking that action. That might be useful information, but knowing which program was getting in the way would have been more helpful. But even more helpful would be to not have to dismiss little notifier windows all the time.

There's also something in the GNOME system on Fedora which feels entitled to adjust the backlight brightness anytime it thinks that the user has screwed it up again. This happens even after the "dim display on idle" options have been disabled, and often results in making the display brighter on an idle system. If the user has set the backlight brightness, the system should not presume to readjust it. One should not have to wrestle with one's computer over the brightness of the display.

OpenSolaris

Some whim or other inspired your editor to install the OpenSolaris 200805 release. It has been almost ten years since the last encounter with Solaris, so, perhaps, it was time for a brief reunion. Brief it was.

The installation procedure for this operating system is textual; it seems rather primitive next to the effort Linux distributors have been putting into making their installers attractive. There is a license acceptance stage, where the poor user gets to scroll through all of the licenses applicable to the software in this distribution - 244 licenses in all. There's no requirement to indicate acceptance, though.

The installed system worked with the Atheros wireless by virtue of a binary-only driver. Initially it only worked so well, though; this system, from Sun "the network is the computer" Microsystems, installs itself configured to use a local hosts file (only) for hostname lookups. Your editor had to manually tweak nsswitch.conf to get it to use DNS. Sun's equivalent to NetworkManager is the "network automagic daemon," which is obscure in spots but seems to work. There is no power savings to be had from turning off the wireless interface.

On the power front, once your editor tracked down a Powertop port, the system was seen to be drawing 11.5 watts. Unlike with any Linux distribution, Solaris runs the processor at its fastest speed at all times; there does not appear to be any concept of CPU frequency control. The laptop fan runs constantly under Solaris.

There is no suspend capability, no hibernate. In general, it would appear that the Solaris developers have not put a whole lot of effort into the power management problem so far - at least, not on x86; the OpenSolaris power management page says that life is better with the Sparc port and that all this goodness is coming to x86 Real Soon Now.

The external video port did not work at all under OpenSolaris. Your editor was charmed to notice that the Solaris folks have retained the classic "log off now or risk your files being damaged" message in the shutdown procedure.

On the 2510p, the OpenSolaris CD brought up GRUB, but did not succeed in booting into the installer.

All told, OpenSolaris has some catching-up to do. Laptops were almost certainly not at the top of the priority list for Project Indiana, but it is still a little discouraging to see how far behind things are.

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3

The openSUSE development cycle is heading toward its close, so your editor decided to go with the beta 3 release. It must be said that this distribution got off on rather the wrong foot; it puts up an end-user license agreement which prohibits redistribution for compensation, bundling openSUSE with any other "offering," reverse engineering, transfer of the software, use in a production environment, or publishing benchmark results (but only if you're a software vendor). Users are required to stop using the software upon termination of the license, which happens after 90 days, after the next release, or whenever Novell says so. And, just in case one was considering the crime of using the release for too long:

There's a certain amount of weasel-wording to the effect that Novell is not trying to take away any rights conferred by the real licenses on the software it ships. So the EULA has little force. But it is not consistent with the mores of the community from which Novell took this software, and it leaves a bad taste in one's mouth.

Installation is relatively straightforward, though a bit more mouse-intensive than some other distributions. But one has to watch carefully: openSUSE, by default, configures the system to automatically log in the user account created at installation time. An amusing addition is that, after suspending and resuming the system (which works), a password prompt will be presented, even though none is required on a cold boot.

openSUSE, like Fedora, thinks that it's smarter than the user and is entitled to readjust the backlight at any time.

As mentioned, suspending the system worked without trouble. Hibernation, however, failed; it goes straight to resume without halting the system. openSUSE ships the ath5k driver, so the wireless interface worked flawlessly with free software. The external monitor port is always on under openSUSE; the dialogs offered to create a Xinerama setup, but that operation failed.

Power consumption was 11.2 watts, with 106 wakeups happening per second. Your editor noticed that beagled was running; something which was not observed on other systems. Powertop noticed too, and politely offered to kill it off; that brought the system down to 78 wakeups with slightly less power used. Removing the ath5k driver brought consumption down to 10.8 watts.

Experience with the 2510p was quite similar. Hibernate still fails. Power usage is a low 9.0 watts; 8.8 when the "kill beagled" option is selected. Unfortunately, this lower usage is likely to be a result of the wireless interface not working. NetworkManager is able to present a list of access points, but does not succeed in associating with any of them. This is a device with a free driver, well supported in the 2.6.25 kernel shipped by openSUSE; its failure to work is discouraging.

Many of the glitches encountered in this distribution are easily explained by pointing out that it is a beta release. One can only assume that many of them will be fixed up before the final version. With that done, openSUSE has the potential to be a solid system for laptops; many of the right pieces are there. Your editor, though, will have a hard time considering an openSUSE installation; that unpleasant EULA has left a lasting impression.

Ubuntu 8.04

Ubuntu made its name partially through its attention to laptop installations, so your editor had reasonably high expectations from the "Hardy Heron" long-term-support release. Those expectations were met, for the most part.

The installation CD did its job, and the resulting system worked well. The Ubuntu time zone selector deserves special mention, though: it tries to pan the world map under the mouse, with the effect that the target one is aiming for moves away as one gets close. It's a video game of sorts, but it can be a little frustrating, especially with a laptop-style mouse device.

Wireless works, but Ubuntu silently installs the MadWifi driver to bring that about. Suspend and hibernate work, as do the various Thinkpad buttons. Ubuntu demonstrates some of the same backlight obnoxiousness as the other GNOME-based distributions - but quite a bit less of it.

This system drew 9.5 watts of power, with 47 wakeups per second. With this configuration, disabling the wireless in NetworkManager did reduce power usage considerably - down to 8.1 watts. It would seem that the MadWifi driver still knows something about powering down the hardware that ath5k doesn't. Even so, removing MadWifi entirely dropped consumption still further, to 7.8 watts.

On the 2510p, things generally worked well. Power consumption was 10.1 watts, with an amazing 217 wakeups per second, though. Part of the problem here appears to be a bug in the i915 driver which causes it to generate a steady stream of interrupts if the 3D engine is engaged. Ubuntu turns on Compiz by default, causing the video processor to pound on the CPU. Turning off "visual effects" cut the wakeup rate considerably. Following Powertop's advice and disabling the Bluetooth interface as well dropped the system down to 9.7 watts and 50 wakeups per second.

Concluding notes

Here's a table summarizing some of the results reported above:

Distribution	Power		Susp	Hib	Wireless	Notes
Debian Lenny	10.7		N	Y	N
Fedora 9	8.9		Y	Y	Y	Encrypted install option
OpenSolaris 200805	11.5		N	N	N	No external video
OpenSUSE 11.0b3	11.2	11.1	Y	N	Y
Ubuntu 8.04	9.5	8.1	Y	Y	Y	Installs MadWifi

The second power number, when present, indicates what is achievable with minimal tweaking: turning off wireless or letting Powertop shut things down. More invasive techniques (unloading modules, for example, or changing kernel boot parameters) are not included.

For the 2510p, the results are:

Distribution	Power		Susp	Hib	Wireless	Notes
Fedora 9	11.0	10.1	Y	Y	Y
OpenSUSE 11.0b3	9.0	8.8	Y	N	N	No wireless
Ubuntu 8.04	10.1	9.7	Y	Y	Y

Two other distributions were tried, but did not make it all the through the survey process:

• Gentoo. Playing with Gentoo has been on the list for years. So an install disk was downloaded and your editor launched into the "quick install guide." It is clear that Gentoo employs a rather long value of "quick." This guide prints over many pages, includes 39 "code listings," requires creating each filesystem by hand, etc. Your editor would still like to play with Gentoo, but there was no time for such an exercise now. Life has gotten too short to go through that kind of obstacle course just to get Linux installed on a computer.

• Slackware. In this case, your editor was able to get through the somewhat rustic Slackware 12.1 installation procedure. It was kind of nostalgic to see LILO again. The system ran, and even brought up the window system, but the system would lock hard as soon as your editor tried to bring up a terminal window. That, too, was not the sort of experience which had been sought.

What comes out of all this work is that the Linux community now has a few good options for laptop-friendly distributions. Getting Linux running well on a laptop need no longer be an act of advanced wizardry.

That said, there's clearly still room for improvement. Even well-supported hardware does not always cooperate well. For a laptop system, in particular, it is important to be able to power down unneeded hardware without having to dig into the system configuration or unload kernel modules. If the wireless interface, FireWire port, modem, BlueTooth interface, etc. are not being used, they should not be drawing power. After all, if the laptop's user is going to have something to actually do through a long series of LinuxWorld keynotes, it's important to stretch that battery as far as possible. Progress has been made, but there is more to do.

Your editor must now make a choice as to which distribution will remain on these laptops. For the X31, the choice makes itself: Fedora. It works the best while installing only free software. One could retrofit a 2.6.25 kernel into an Ubuntu installation to get the ath5k driver, but it's nicer to not have to do that. For the 2510p, the choice is not quite so clear. It might, in the end, be Ubuntu for the slightly lower power consumption and fewer backlight hassles. The potential (not always realized) for online upgrades might also tip things a little more in the Ubuntu direction. All of that will have to be traded off against Fedora's out-of-the-box encrypted installation, though. But either Ubuntu or Fedora is a fine choice for this machine; it is nice to be in a position where there are a couple of high-quality alternatives.

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to post comments

Casually I use daily exactly the same laptop with Debian sid since years. I use a Cisco
Aironet 350 as wifi card and it works like a charm, but I chosed that card exactly for its
fine support with any recent kernel.
 
But for that, the external VGA definitively works under Debian: you have only to use the
current Xrandr 1.2 support to activate the external VGA after boot, and possibly choose your
preferred mode. I solved my ATI issues with beamers since that version.

> Xrandr 1.2 hasn't propagated to testing yet.

It's been in testing since a year (but only for intel hardware until last month).

I've been looking for a distribution for an older (circa 1997) laptop.  I've tried TinyMe, but
the live CD can't find the (ISA) IDE interface.  I'm working on hacking the initrd image to
disable libata which I think is the problem.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a distribution for an older laptop?

Some distros to try that should fit (assuming you have say 64 to 96 MB RAM like my old
ThinkPad 560, some will run in less):

* Damn Small Linux - the 2.4 kernel is quite good for this vintage of hardware.  Knoppix
based, very small download and in RAM, uses real bash and vim by default, can add dpkg and apt
but not 100% Debian compatible. Fluxbox or JWM.  I found it was impossible to join the forums
(no admin response), but I do run this on my ThinkPad.

* Puppy Linux - very newbie friendly but no bash or vi by default, many wizards, very
fragmented set of derived distros, friendly community. Fluxbox or JWM.

Others I haven't tried that are worth a look perhaps are: SliTaz (really tiny, 25 MB ish),
Slax, Ubuntu Lite, and many others...  See this list of distros ordered by size:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=575456 (mostly not Ubuntu based).

Ubuntu Lite is not an official variant but it's aiming for 56 MB RAM - see
http://ubuntulite.tuxfamily.org/ and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=98233

If you are short of time I would just try DSL and stick with that if it works well enough for
you.  However if you have a favourite distro family such as Slackware or Ubuntu then a derived
distro may be better.

You should also search for your laptop name and the distro in question to get an idea of
whether it will work OK.

I would recommend Opera on this sort of distro, but getting a security updated version may be
hard - this is one reason to pursue the UbuntuLite option as that makes it easier.  Buying a
large Flash drive is a good way to revive an old laptop - internal CF drives are also a good
option. 

+1 on recommending DSL for a "small-memory-enhanced" laptop.

I run DSL on an *old* Toshiba 2540cds w/96MB RAM, and it runs like a champ.

well, Vector Linux has an edition especially for very old computers.

Did you try Debian netinst? I'm sure I've done a netinstall from floppies on a Toshiba Tecra
520CDT, and used its PCMCIA net card to download.

One problem I've noticed -- having about six or seven (depending on 
whether one counts the pismo powerbook my eldest daughter dropped on the 
floor but which I still want to revive) laptops of varying age is the 
disappearance of support for older laptops. Not only the way-too-new sound 
chip on my twin daughters' lenovo laptops isn't supported yet, but the 
hoary sound chip on my eldest daughter's Dell 5150 laptop doesn't work 
with 2007 vintage laptops anymore (Kubuntu and Suse). My Lenovo X61t 
worked fine with the previous Kubuntu, but not the current one, thought 
OpenSUSE 10.3 works fine in almost all respects. Of course, compiling KDE4 
and KOffice2 all day doesn't allow it to do its power-management best...

I think both Debian and Ubuntu offer an option for encrypted filesystem on installation. For
Ubuntu you might need the "Alternate Install CD" - it isn't a "Live CD" - it is essentially
Debian's text mode setup, so it is actually  preferable to Ubuntu's regular installation. 

I'm surprised that an encrypted disk wasn't an option for the OpenSuSE installer. I remember
setting this up sometime ago when I installed SuSE 9.2   some time ago. At the time it was a
very laptop friendly distribution as far as linux was concerned. (No suspend or hibernate as I
recall - or at least I didn't try them)

Debian certainly does: I've installed both Etch and Lenny within the last month, and was given
(and took) the option in both cases.

"For Ubuntu you might need the "Alternate Install CD" - it isn't a "Live CD" - it is
essentially Debian's text mode setup, so it is actually  preferable to Ubuntu's regular
installation."

Ubuntu's "Server" version is similarly the text-based installer. I installed this recently and
it offers the options of both LVM and encrypted partitions.

Ubuntu does offer encrypted filesystems (and LVM) using the Alternate CD as mentioned - see
http://learninginlinux.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/installin... for a reasonable HOWTO, though it's mostly about following the installer prompts.

Mandriva 2008.1 should not be overlooked. On my last laptop I tried Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04 and
Mandriva 2008.1, and finally kept Mandriva as overall the most convincing of the three
distros. 

Seconded. It will be very cool to see the same test with Mandriva 2008.1.

Same here.  I have a Dell Inspiron E1705 and Mandriva 2008.1 had everything working out of the
box.  In fact, it was the first distro I've had where everything just worked and I didn't have
to go about building my own kernel.

I'm also is a bit disappointed too see a review including OpenSolaris and a beta release, but
not the released Mandriva 2008.1

I'm afraid it might just leave some bad taste in mouth just as Novell's inventions: folks have
clearly shifted from community-friendly approach into commercialized one.

Wouldn't recommend it to anyone after they've fired Gael, frankly.

Current default kernel in Lenny (which is Testing, ratherthan Unstable) is 2.6.24-1 .

As you mentioned the "aging stable", any news about EtchAndAHalf? I'm already using its
packages on some systems that had problems with Etch's kernel.

Did you notice any funny business with the master wireless disable switch on the Thinkpad?  I
have the X61 model and the behavior is very odd.  If the machine is booted with the master
wireless switch in the off position, all the radios are on and the switch does nothing.  If
the machine is booted with the switch in the on position, it works normally.

I also wonder about your (or readers') experiences with "laptop mode".  When my Ubuntu 8.04
machine boots, the disk runs all the time.  If I manually issue "laptop_mode start" then the
disk is configured for periodic shutdown.  Why isn't laptop mode started on boot?  I also
notice that I have to reissue this command after wake from sleep.

Would be interested also if someone could measure power usage while the machine is asleep.

With the exceptions of OpenSolaris, all the mentioned distributions run very similar
softwares. It would be much instructive to determine what changes make the differences
observed here.

The openSUSE beta EULA is mostly due to magazines in germany selling with 
ultra large letters "OPENSUSE 11 ON DVD!!!!!" (and in very small 
print) "alpha version".

Ciao, Marcus

Surely the magazines are quite within their rights to distribute copies of any version of
OpenSuSE, including alpha releases?  It is meant to be free software, no?

All the OpenSuSE guys need do is make sure their installer displays a message that this is an
alpha release.  If they want to send their lawyers on the attack, registering and enforcing a
trademark for OpenSuSE would be a far less boneheaded way to do it.

true, but then mindshare and release craze is the only palpable currency in a world where
distributions are free for the taking. i can understand the suse crowd is less than enthused
about people ripping them off by pushing pre-release stuff to the masses to improve their
sales, and taking momentum out of the legitimate release at the same time.

it should be noted that the final release eula is a lot more in keeping with established
standards of the open source community.

i agree there should be a less obnoxious way of discouraging freeloaders - maybe the suse
community should review their pre-release eula. but compared to a windows pre-release one,
it's still amazingly friendly :-D

>openSUSE, like Fedora, thinks that it's smarter than the user and is entitled to readjust the
backlight at any time.

Somewhat. It automatically dims when going to battery power, which is what Windows (or Windows
drivers) did for decades, and which I consider ok as a default. As far autodimming when on AC,
hm, I think I noticed it on 10.3 too, but I do not care that much for even in maximum
intensity, it cannot beat the sunlight (it's a matte display).

This is not the problem.  gnome-power-manager somehow readjusts the backlight on battery power
arbitrarily while the laptop is being used.  I.e. I put it down and some minutes later it goes
back to full backlight, all by itself.  (Seen on Debian unstable.)

I've noticed this too, it's very frustrating.  Gnome seems to see any minor state change as a
instance to revert the screen brightness based on the default plugged/unplugged brightness.
These seems to be absolutely no consideration for preserving the brightness level when it was
manually adjusted by the user.  I'm really glad the editor brought up this issue, hopefully it
will draw some attention to improving it.

I have a Thinkpad X31 (type 2672-CM3), but with the wireless upgraded to an Intel ipw2200.

I'm running Debian etch, and use ACPI suspend/resume daily. Regrettably, it's not as stable as
it could be. I have experienced the wireless-flaky-on-resume problem, fixable with an
rmmod/modprobe cycle. However, the main problem is that the system refuses to resume about 1
time in 10.

I recently updated to a Lenny kernel (linux-image-2.6.24-1-686_2.6.24-4_i386.deb) and things
are perhaps a little more stable -- I've had about 30 suspend/resume cycles before each
lockup.

Counting the positives, I've had none of the reported problems on the suspend side, and no
trouble with backlights, battery drain or graphics state (graphics chip on this machine is an
ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY).

thinkwiki.org have a number of detailed pages that go into the ins and outs for Thinkpads...

For me, it's Fedora 9....I was sold when I booted the LiveUSB key, and even my built-in
Verizon EV-DO card worked, with ZERO configuration!

Have you tried it? I did, about 10 times before I realized (I'm a slow learner) that it wasn't
me making the mistake, the installer just doesn't work. It's a known issue and one of the
items that was brought up when the whole "gentoo foundation allowed to expire" event happened.

Yes, I have tried it. It's worked for me every time. I understand there seem to be some
hardware-specific problems as well as issues with strange partitioning setups.

> Debian Lenny (unstable)

> Your editor chose to perform this experiment with a mid-May Debian Lenny
> testing release, rather than the aging stable distribution. That installed
> a system with a 2.6.22 kernel which, of course, has no ath5k driver. So no
> wireless on the X31 for Debian users - at least, not without installing
> the proprietary MadWifi module. Unsurprisingly, the Debian installer did
> not offer MadWifi as an option.

Lenny is currently based on 2.6.24 with an ath5k backport. Newer ath5k is found in unstable
with 2.6.25 Linux images.

The current daily images of Lenny are based on 2.6.24.
-> http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

The mid may image can only be an older Beta 1 installer.

I'm in the market for a laptop, and it's a pain to find out which laptops are okay for Linux.
I'd like to know about both Ubuntu and Fedora (I prefer Fedora, but I would like to be ABLE to
switch), and if the laptop can suspend/resume, support exterior displays, sound, that sort of
thing.  Yes, there are sites that help, but I sure would like it to be easier.

Sites like http://www.emperorlinux.com/ sell pre-configured Linux laptops - even if you don't
want to use those, you can see which models they are selling (ThinkPad etc) and put those on
your short list.

And of course if you like the Dell Linux laptops then your purchase would register as a Linux
hardware sale.

Seem the issues with distros are actually mostly issues with drivers (kernel + X).

1) Hardware device X not detected/working at all
   - Whatever distro has the latest Kernel + X will win here. Some distros might workaround by
bundling out-of-tree drivers (usually with the expense of stability/quality).

2) Suspend not working
   - So the kernel/X driver is buggy.

3) Hardware working partially (external displays, hardware hot keys..)
   - There is some integration that might be necessary to do here for the distro, but with
recent kernels, HAL, etc, It's again just up to who is freshest.

4) power consumption

   - Distros can spoil this by bundling and starting lots of polling software, so "bare"
distros have a advantage here. But again, drivers are important here. On my X40, enabling DRI
made X the top wakeup source (After that, network-manager - wtf?)...

Generally timing of this review dictates who will "win" - IE what distro happens to in a
release cycle moment allowing them to have the freshest kernel of the bunch. That is assuming
the kernel / X hasn't suffered from regressions, which isn't taken for granted. For example
the new RandR stuff broke many X setups with multiple different display adapters. 

So distributions can mostly compete here by a) contributing driver fixes b) streamlining the
process of getting latest upstreams included (while managing to avoid regressions).

The importance of high-quality drivers seems way underestimated.

It's not just drivers, it's configuration - even on the latest Ubuntu kernel, I found that my
desktop box won't hibernate until I tweak the ACPI and X configuration.  One line changes in
both cases and easily done, but there's no Ubuntu wizard that does this automatically.

Ubuntu is generally good at self-configuring for almost everything, but power management is
nowhere near as well configured "out of the box" as it should be.

One thing I've always found to be very weak is support for docking stations/port replicators.
Most of the time, at least one feature of them won't work to some degree.  Problems I've run
into:
* Port replicator sound doesn't work.  Sometimes it doesn't work at all, and the laptop's
headphone jack must be used.  Sometimes it works, but produces really crappy sound quality
(worse than Windows on the same hardware).
* Port replicator video doesn't work.  Either it doesn't come on at all, or it tries to
display at the laptop's native 1280×800 resolution on a 1024×768 display.
* Docking doesn't work right.  Either it completely hangs the system, or doesn't switch to the
docking station video, or doesn't detect a network, USB, or some other peripheral.  Sometimes
it works if the laptop was booted in docked mode, undocked, and redocked.  Sometimes it
doesn't.

I've encountered these problems on a Dell C610, D500, D620, X200 and X300.

Anyway, docking stations might be worth considering in a future review of how well various
distros work with laptops.

I've found that docking doesn't work well on Windows XP either - I had a docking station for
my Dell D600 using XP, and returned the dock to IT because the laptop kept hanging or failing
to resume after a dock or undock operation.

I currently don't use a dock - the time it takes me to plug in 3-4 wires (power, USB mouse,
VGA and sometimes Ethernet) is quite minimal compared to the time I wasted when the docking
process failed.

However, docking is very convenient and does work OK for many Windows users, so it's good if
Linux supports it.

We use Thinkpads at my work.  A number of my colleagues (all Linux users) use various
IBM/Lenovo docking solutions and are quite happy with them.  So happy in fact, that they
convinced me to order a docking station for myself last week :-).

I imagine it's simply a result of that fact that the number of people using docking stations
is a very small minority.  

I'm sure that's the reason it doesn't work very well, but I'm also sure (in fact, I know from
experience) that there is variability in how well particular systems and particular docking
stations work with Linux.  (even different systems in the same docking station).  I'm sure
there is also variability among distros with the same hardware.

As such, I think they would be worth considering in a review of how various distros work with
laptops.

There is actually CPU frequency management in OpenSolaris, it's
just not enabled by default:

http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=1636
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_i...

Thank you for the Slackware test -- as a regular -current tester on the desktop, moving to a
notebook for my academic travels, I know it will need a good bit of hacking (it always does),
and especially to be power-efficient.  However, from desktop experience, I know that it's a
potential contender after enough configuring.  Which is precisely not what you were looking
for.  But 12.1 has made significant strides toward being amenable to that purpose in the first
place, with firmware included.

12.1 has advanced its old-fashioned defaults to one extent, and that is that LILO now has a
graphic option.  :)  Still, GRUB is in /extra, and comes with setup programs that will be
familiar to LILO users under Slackware.

Always the caveat, "given enough hacking, Slackware can do anything".  ;)

I always read Jon's articles, whether they cover a subject that's interesting to me or not.
Wordings such as 

"The system ran, and even brought up the window system, but the system would lock hard as soon
as your editor tried to bring up a terminal window. That, too, was not the sort of experience
which had been sought. "

make me happy.

I distro hop on spare partitions, and a recent find is AntiX.  It's a light version of Mepis
for older/slower machines.  I installed it on my first generation Centrino and it positively
sang.  All the system administration benefits of Mepis, but with Fluxbox and Rox.  Excellent
system.  I think it's a tick or two slower than Slackware running Fluxbox, but still faster
than Ubuntu.  Another really good distro is Zenwalk.  It's Slackware based, but configured and
aimed at less experienced users.  It runs XFCE, but it's got pretty good repositories for
heavier and lighter options.  I just downloaded the new 5.2 release, so I'm going to put it on
my laptop to see how it runs.  I might stick with that (had Zenwalk on that machine for about
a year), but I hear AntiX calling my name, too.  I also tried the latest Ubuntu, which did the
most out of the box, but it reminds me more and more of Suse.  It's easier to use, unless you
want to look at the internals yourself.  Then it just feels a bit alien.

I'm always surprised when I see stories about a broken install of Slackware.  I've had such
good luck with it on a range of basic consumer hardware.  I've got it on my laptop's and
desktop's main partitions now, and while it does take some configuring, it's rock solid.

Pity you didn't try Mandriva.  I recently rescued a dying, old Acer laptop (256Kb RAM, 30Gb
HDD) that was grinding to a halt under XP Pro.

Installed Mandriva 2008.1.  Installation was a dream.  The lappy works even with compiz.
Couldn't believe it.  USB wireless detected automatically.  Network printer set up with not the
slightest problem.

I haven't done the sort of testing you did, though.

Peredur

Ditto to the puzzlement of several posters over your choices, including the absence of
Mandriva. I tried Debian Etch first on my T22 Thinkpad, and even though the installation was
generally okay and everything seemed to work, had so much trouble with setting up wireless I
switched to Mandriva 2008.0. It has been relatively trouble-free, and in particular no
fiddling around with iwconfig, etc. Everything else also works well, and I have found the
Mandriva people good about listening to their users and fixing problems with updates.