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Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?

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Old 12-02-2005, 05:38 AM   #1
devit
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Registered: Jan 2004
Distribution: Slackware 9.1
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Is linux a good choice for a notebook?


Excuse me for posting similar messages but this really seems to be a problem to me. I have a Toshiba Satellite L10-202 which comes with Windows XP HE. First of all Windows runs great, power management works fine, all this because of the Toshiba's utilities. I also have a PC (ADM Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 7000, ...) on which I run Slackware since September 2003. I think that my first contact with linux was in February 2003 when I installed RedHat 8. I am now surrounded by CDs with linux distribution like Slackware from 91. to 10.2, RedHat, Fedora SUSE, Gentoo, Mandrake... and two versions of FreeBSD... to many CDs but I don't know what to install on my notebook... for a PC it would be easy... Slackware but let's talk about a laptop:
I need the hardware to work 100%. at this part I am afraid I wont be able to use ACPI without any problems. (I have a poor dial-up internet connection so I am looking for distros that run great on laptop without downloading additional software). I installed SuSE 10 yesterday... it works fine although all the stuff with "config in one click" seems so alien to me because I am used to configure things just by modifying some text files. The fan starts from time to time so I guess acpi works.. but it doesn't works great because the power management in KDE tells me the acpi is partially working. I checked in /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/ (I think this is the path) that the CPU(Celeron M 1.6 GHz) temperature is 51-57 degrees Celsius. Is that OK for a Celeron or it is too hot? So if I install Slackware and recompile the kernel 2.6.13 (or 2.6.14) the acpi would run OK, or I would have problems with acpi or with some drivers and I have to spend hour in front of it to make it work and to transform my laptop in some sort of test ground? I don't like this. I like to edit text files, see how the system really works, tracking processes(I am not a great Slackware user, I know little about servers and networks because of my poor connection to Internet but I am used to use Slackware as a desktop, modifying it to look and work OK - but that's on PC). I like to know the kernel fully supports my hardware.
Using Windows isn't such a nightmare to me. I need an operating system that enables me to edit documents, see movies, listen music, program in C or JAVA... and linux distributions mentioned above have all the necessary software.
Thanks!
 
Old 12-02-2005, 05:56 AM   #2
fouldsy
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Registered: Jan 2002
Location: St Louis, MO
Distribution: Ubuntu
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You've already had this covered twice:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=388063
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=388351

On both occasions you were informed of the ACPI issues requiring SBS to be patched against the kernel for the dsdt to function, which will be the same across all distros. The rest, as in what extra software comes with the distro and how to configure apps is down to you and will come down to whatever you're most comfortable with.
 
  


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