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Driving to Laptopia (Linux Journal)

Doc Searls looks at Linux laptops in this Linux Journal article. "From the laptop perspective, however, I'm an Xtreme road warrior as well as a sub-technical Linux user, which makes me an ideal torture tester for Linux on the laptop (LOTL). Because I don't use a desktop most of the time (I don't want to switch boxes when I come home), LOTL is a better match for me than LOTD (Linux on the desktop). Which is why Don Marti, our Editor-in-Chief here at Linux Journal, wants me to torture-test the best LOTD we can put in my dangerous hands."
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Driving to Laptopia (Linux Journal)

Posted Mar 21, 2004 2:52 UTC (Sun) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

Am I the only one who can't get the Smothers Brothers' recording of "Marching to Pretoria" out
of my head after reading that title?

Well, maybe I am...

Driving to Laptopia (Linux Journal)

Posted Mar 22, 2004 11:13 UTC (Mon) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link]

So *thats* who did that tune!

No, that's the first thing I thought of, and I couldn't
remember where it came from. Was driving me nutz. Don't
think that clue is going to make it better though.

--sheesh!

Driving to Laptopia (Linux Journal)

Posted Mar 23, 2004 3:46 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

Well, originally, it's a movie tune, I'm pretty sure; but they ape it on a record somewhere...

Linux on laptops

Posted Mar 21, 2004 9:53 UTC (Sun) by thomask (guest, #17985) [Link]

I don't know how much of an issue this is for everyone else, but
although I use Linux on desktop for lots of stuff, I'll never use Linux on
my laptop until I can get proper suspend to disk support.

I use my laptop in class at college, and starting up Linux at the
beginning of every lecture sucks. It takes too damn long.

Come on kernel / Fedora guys, give me suspend to disk!

Linux on laptops

Posted Mar 21, 2004 10:27 UTC (Sun) by s52d (guest, #2199) [Link]

While disk suspend even works on some laptops:

I turn on my laptop when parking a car.
While I walk to the class, it is silently booting.
Eveything ready on time.

BR
Iztok

Linux on laptops

Posted Mar 21, 2004 19:57 UTC (Sun) by tavis (guest, #14187) [Link]


It gets uglier for me. I'm doing OpenOffice presentations in class, and XWindows freezes unless I have the VGA cable in when I start it up, which means I can't start it up in advance.

The lack of suspend to disk sort of compounds the problem that the Linux startup sequence is pretty impractical for desktop machines; a dependency tree that started independent services up in parallel (e.g., so xntp isn't waiting for the SMB server to authenticate my shares) would speed things up quite a bit too.

Linux on laptops

Posted Mar 21, 2004 22:32 UTC (Sun) by thomask (guest, #17985) [Link]

Yeah, I thought a better way of starting services would be good for the desktop. Windows, I think, starts a lot of its stuff in the background just after you've logged into the GUI. This cuts startup times (good publicity for M$), but can have the effect of making performance a bit shaky for the first 30 seconds or so of your session. On the other hand, it would be good to have better startup times, and I think I'd be prepared to sacrifice a bit of shakiness for a few secs for the sake of not having to wait an eternity for all my services to start.

Linux on laptops

Posted Mar 21, 2004 23:07 UTC (Sun) by jalexstark (subscriber, #5742) [Link]

My experience with XP Home on a laptop has been that it "resumes" nice and quickly... but so much is still on the disk that it is not truly awake. In comparison, Mandrake 8.2 (yes, still), which had fairly good suspension on my IBM T20 (apart from video challenges eg DVD).

There is no contest between these two. Although the resume with IBM+Linux is longer, it is then usable. On the HP+XP you have to sit there pressing buttons to get it back to life: more frustrating and time-wasting.

That's not to say that keeping suspend/resume times down isn't desirable, of course.

Linux on laptops

Posted Mar 22, 2004 0:15 UTC (Mon) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

You can renumber your init scripts to start everything that X needs, then xdm or gdm, then all other services.

Start up services delays

Posted Mar 22, 2004 17:47 UTC (Mon) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

You can even edit the rc scripts to make parts of them
run in the background. You can have other scripts that depend on
them check for .pid files in /var/run and sleep/poll until they
see the ones they need (their requisite precursors).

I even know of one group that radically re-wrote their entire
set of rc scripts as Makefiles (which handle dependencies, of course)
and can theoretically be run with make -j (spawn off multiple jobs
in parallel.

Basically the only limits to the level of parallelization you can have
in the startup are those that are inherent in the task (dependencies)
and your own cleverness in shell scripting.

You can also run different runlevels for "in class" and "on the net"
for example --- thus only running the networking services, NTP daemon
etc when you're plugging in, for example. (I'm assuming that wireless
is not yet pervasive in smaller colleges and among college students).

JimD

Linux on laptops

Posted Mar 23, 2004 6:57 UTC (Tue) by s52d (guest, #2199) [Link]

Hello!

About X-Window freezing: XF86Config.
I spend quite some time booting Sony VAIO with monitor attached
in order for BIOS to do the job for me.
Some RTFM, google and now it is handled by X itself.

I only miss having same picture on both screens, using different
resolution. Presentations (pdflatex, acroread) run on the wall,
while xclock take over laptop LCD.

BR

Iztok

Linux on laptops

Posted Mar 25, 2004 10:55 UTC (Thu) by stevan (subscriber, #4342) [Link]

Personally, and obviously not a universal solution, I only need my laptop
to go to sleep rather than suspend to disk, and my trusty old IBM X21 did
that happily under SUSE 9.0, and now does so even happier under Gentoo.
(Under SuSE, the Netgear WiFI card didn't sleep properly, requiring a
tweak to, if I recall, hotplug settings, but it sleeps and restores
perfectly under Gentoo.) What's more, if necessary, cold boot switch-on
to kde desktop is now just under 2 minutes, even on that old 700MHz
machine. While getting APM, ACPI etc to work is harder than it should
be, there has been progress on this front.

S

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