I'm looking at buying a Lenovo G550 (T4200 / 4 GB DDr3 / 320 GB).
I normally use Mint, but I'd be happy to use any distro offering good HW support.
Googling this model + linux produces almost nil result - one partly relevant return.

Has anyone installed linux on the G550, and can indicate how well the HW functions are supported?
ANY info would be most welcome.

I use Mint, a good distro. Why don't you stay with it? May be you can try the live distro to make sure it is working fine with your hardware.

The particular distro isn't the problem. I'll continue to use Mint, although these days I'm largely distro-agnostic. My last fixed loyalty to a distro was to the now sadly-defunct Libranet.

What really concerns me is the degree of driver-availability, particularly for wifi. Also, what about suspend and hibernate? These are issues which only hands-on experience can really resolve. So I need to find someone who has this laptop with linux installed, and can tell me from real experience.

Meanwhile, I'll keep trawling through Google. Thanks.

1.Anything with an Intel wireless card, eg I have an intel 4965agn(which uses the iwlagn module), or the the newer 5100/5300 which are an option usually these days are supported out of the box (however i had to install the firmware only for my distro)

2.Suspend: Wouldn't work properly so I made an alias for the following command:

(I have no use for hibernate.)

3.Fingerprint reader: nice toy but haven't bothered to get it working, i know it can be done.

By the way i have a lenovo T61p

Going to the shop and trying a liveCD is not an option?

Probably yes. I haven't yet asked in the shop, but I imagine they'll agree. I'm actually waiting until mid-November to buy on the assumption that:
a) Windows 7 comes out this week
b) OEMs are waiting for Windows 7 and the Xmas shopping season to release new laptop models
c) existing models may well be discounted then
d) a newly-released model may then be preferable

In any case, if by mid to late November the G550 still looks the best option for me, I'll buy it then. Meanwhile, the best info I've found is http://www.linlap.com/wiki/lenovo+g550 . I'd like to hear of hands-on experience, but it seems that there shouldn't be any major problems with the G550.

Thanks.

Hi Howard

I bought a Lenovo G550 last week, and installed dual-boot XP/Ubuntu 9.10 a few days ago. I'm new to Linux, but it's working out quite well. So far no Lenovo/hardware problems. And I like the laptop. Beautiful screen.

Watch out - that you don't get in trouble like me - my first attempt at installation didn't go well, and then it was impossible to put Windows back on. But I found that if I changed a harddrive setting in the BIOS from ACHI to IDE, then I could finally install.

I'm definitely a Linewbie - I couldn't succeed in installing Linux on the partition I had set up for it. Or maybe I did, but Windows refused to start afterwards... He he. But now it's OK.

Laptop details (if you haven't bought one already): works really well. Unless you wanna do some really heavy video editing or play the latest games - then I'd say it's got all the power you need. Harddrive could be bigger and faster, and battery life could be even a bit longer - there could be some more ports.....and those touchpad buttons click a bit loudly, but....for the low price I think it's a good deal.

(what was a drag for me was that Vista was already installed, but no Vista- or recovery CD. After I formatted and put XP on, I had to download a bunch of drivers.......)

All-in-all: I'm a happy camper.

To BelzeBob...

If you installed XP from a XP CD, you were probably asked at the beginning of the installation process to install any needed drivers with a floppy. There was no floppy drive.

If this was the case, and you want to use the AHCI setting in the BIOS and have the advantages of the SATA HDD, and you have the AHCI driver, you can slipstream the driver to the installation and make a CD incorporating the driver by using this.

http://www.nliteos.com/

You will have to google for a good guide to how to use the program. The interface is not very intuitive, but once you understand it, is simple enough.

Hello Jarl

Thanks a lot, I'm bookmarking it. Yeah, I have one more such instruction for re-enabling the AHCI - but the guy who posted it said that for a regular PC there isn't that much advantage to it... What do you think?

Yes - when I tried to install XP (I even tried W98) a blue screen would appear after a few minutes telling me something about missing drivers for harddrive, or errors in the harddrive. (The fedora CD would still boot though.) do you have any idea why the problem happened in the first place? As I remember...I had successfully (?) installed Fedora on the partition I had chosen, and then I rebooted and got the Windows message "wrong tables!" (He he), or something like that. Did Fedora "knock out" Windows somehow?

One thing: how can I test that my integrated webcam works in Ubuntu?

I'm getting routine errors from my Linux Mint 7 running iwlagn for Intel 4965 wifi.
Does this suggest I need to update or re-install my microcode file? Where do I get that and how do I re-install just the mu-code?

~~~ 0;-Dan