Can anyone point me in the direction of a Linux distibution, for use by a non-techie (current windows and mac user), that is viable on a battery powered laptop.

My pet user (sister) has tried ubuntu and pclinuxos (and loved both of them) - but experienced dreadful battery life (30 minutes on fully charged battery, compared to 2 hours plus on Windows XP). As a user, she basically wants to install and run - i.e. no techie tweaks and editing of config files.

Any help gratefully received

Ciao
Bruno

Well, if ACPI isn't setup/running, chances are your laptop is going full-tilt the whole time. When you enable it, the power-management stuff kicks in, and dims the screen, throttles things back, etc., to give you better battery life.

I've used openSUSE from 10.1 to the current 11.2 on my various Vaio laptops, all with good results. Most everything 'just works', right out of the box. For example, my CS110E with 11.2, everything works, with the annoying exception of my internal microphone. Everything else (webcam, DVD burner, SD card slots, firewire, etc.), came right up. Battery life is good, too...power management widget in KDE4 lets me save profiles, so when I'm unplugged, I get good battery life.

I'm sure that others have similar good-luck stories with other distros, too.

1 members found this post helpful.

Many thanks TBOne, I will certainly try openSUSE - my (or should I say my sister's) biggest issue is that the user is a total non-techie and has this niaive expectation that things "just work" :-)

Ciao
Bruno

Linux Mint. Media codecs, wifi, everything works out-of-the-box. Setup very similar to windows too.

Take a look at
http://distrowatch.com/

I would like to thank everyone for their help.

After trying a number of distros, my sister (bless her) has chosen LinuxMint - and is VERY Happy to get away from Windows!

I must admit to being a little puzzled at LinuxMint working like a dream out of the box, where Ubuntu 'karmic' didn't.

Anyway, problem solved

Thanks to all

Ciao
Bruno

You're welcome...but don't be puzzled.

Different distros support different hardware/feature sets, based on how they perceive it being used. Mint/Ubuntu/Kubuntu, are geared more towards the former-Windows-user set, running on end-user type hardware. So the gadgets like webcams, mics, sound cards, etc., will more likely work out of the box. Different setups, though, cause things to work better/differently than others, like the (probably) ACPI problems you had with Ubuntu on the laptop.

More 'server-grade' distros (CentOS, openSUSE, etc.), are geared towards server class stuff. So RAID cards, fiber channel adapters, and the like, will work, while the end-user type gadgets might not. Granted, you CAN get them working...but you've got to want it.