Lightweight laptops running Slackware - Post your model
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Defiantly not anything apple, no way I can afford them or have the down time while its being sent off to be fixed multiple times or waiting on one of the recalls.
I'm looking for 12" or smaller business class. Dell had a Latitude 2100 but seems to have discontinued it. Its frustrating, I keep finding cheap consumer grade or tablets with no storage and limited OS and can't tell if i can throw a useable OS on them or not.
For a business class machine that small, the only options I am aware of are the Zenbook and the Acer Aspire S7 (not to be confused with the Aspire netbook I mentioned above; this one is made of aluminum and has the Core series processors, 1080p, a touchscreen, etc.), and some hybrid tablet/laptop convertibles like the Sony Vaio Duo 11. However, even if you are looking at 12" or under, I would suggest you still consider the Dell XPS 13, because even though it has a 13" screen, they made a point of stretching the screen all the way out to the edges of the chassis so the actual form factor is not much different than some of the 11.6 inch ones. My Zenbook, for instance, has about an inch of space around the sides. The Dell does not. I have also heard the Dell is particularly friendly to Linux. I might have gotten one myself, except for the fact that I read some bad reviews about the touchpad. This year's model of the Zenbook (but not last year's!) did better in that respect--and it just looks cool.
If I had it to do over again I would probably still get the Zenbook, but there are some caveats. Other than the really stunning metal design and the extreme lightness (I think it may be the lightest ultrabook on the market, but don't quote me), one of the main reasons I chose it was because of the screen. They actually have two different display options, one of which is a normal HD, and another, which I got, which is an IPS with 1900 x 1080 resolution. It really is brilliant. However, with a resolution this high on a relatively small screen, I had to do a lot of tweaking to get things to be the right size. I have it basically the way I want it now, but every once in a while there will be cases when I have an issue come up where things are not rendered at the right size, and I will have to deal with it. Don't get me wrong, it's a great machine, and like I said I would probably buy it again, but it has seriously made me wish for resolution independence in Linux. One should definitely be aware that this issue exists before thinking about getting one.
Of course, the one with the standard HD display would have no such issue. But I guess I would still rather spend a few days fiddling than sacrifice image quality. It's a matter of preference, though. Mileage may vary.
Thought I would throw my 2 cents in. I have a HP DV6-6145DX that I run Slackware64 on just fine. It is an AMD APU laptop fyi. The only thing that does not work out of the box is the fingerprint reader which I have never even bothered to try and fix. I put a 128gig SSD in it and its nice little machine.
I'm running Slackware64-current on a new Asus Zenbook, model UX21A. Everything important worked out of the box (I guess the unimportant things would be the screen brightness keys and a few other things I can't think of right now, so they can't have been that major). It took a bit of tweaking to make things perfect, but it is working flawlessly right now.
I am working on a guide to getting it set up with Slackware.
This would be great. I followed the guide at the Ubuntu site, but it would be good to have one that is specific for Slackware. It's a great laptop that works very nicely after some adjustments.
Samsung NC10-anyNET, 2 GB RAM is running Slackware 14.0 with Kernel 3.8.13 from -current.
All components are supported OotB, including the Samsung HSPA 3G modem.
Issues:
Idle power consumption under Linux is 50-70 % more than with the pre-installed Windows 7 Starter, so battery life is reduced by about 30-40 %. Fan is spinning almost all the time.
Caution: The preinstalled Samsung Recovery Solution (the integrated backup and recovery functionality) uses a specially formatted MBR and the sectors following the MBR. The firmware entry point for SRS gets destroyed by installing any bootloader into the MBR or any other bootloader than LILO. Once broken, there is no way to restore SRS functionality by any means other than restoring a sector-based factory disk image, which you have to create yourself beforehand. An intact recovery partition is not sufficient.
Solution: Install LILO into the Linux partition and set the boot flag. Stay away from GRUB an other boot loaders, which use the MBR or the space between the MBR and the first partition (which is the recovery partition on this machine).
Additional notes:
Google Chrome 24 with Pepper Flash Player 11.6 supports accelerated video output on the GMA950 GPU of the NC10, so fullscreen video playback is possible. Other browsers with the stale 11.2 plugin max out the N270 CPU with a 240p window.
The NC10-anyNET has two (!) full-size Mini PCI Express slots containing the 11g Wi-Fi card and the 3G modem. They can be replaced with different hardware. The pre-installed hard-drive is a 2.5in 9.5mm SATA one, so there is room for up to 1 TB.
This would be great. I followed the guide at the Ubuntu site, but it would be good to have one that is specific for Slackware. It's a great laptop that works very nicely after some adjustments.
Alright, I'll get to it next week then. It's something I've been meaning to finish for a while, but since we're stuck with 24 hour days instead of 30, I've kept putting it off. But if there is actually someone who would like to see it, that gives me a reason to make the time!
For a business class machine that small, the only options I am aware of are the Zenbook and the Acer Aspire S7 (not to be confused with the Aspire netbook I mentioned above; this one is made of aluminum and has the Core series processors, 1080p, a touchscreen, etc.), and some hybrid tablet/laptop convertibles like the Sony Vaio Duo 11. However, even if you are looking at 12" or under, I would suggest you still consider the Dell XPS 13, because even though it has a 13" screen, they made a point of stretching the screen all the way out to the edges of the chassis so the actual form factor is not much different than some of the 11.6 inch ones. My Zenbook, for instance, has about an inch of space around the sides. The Dell does not. I have also heard the Dell is particularly friendly to Linux. I might have gotten one myself, except for the fact that I read some bad reviews about the touchpad. This year's model of the Zenbook (but not last year's!) did better in that respect--and it just looks cool.
If I had it to do over again I would probably still get the Zenbook, but there are some caveats. Other than the really stunning metal design and the extreme lightness (I think it may be the lightest ultrabook on the market, but don't quote me), one of the main reasons I chose it was because of the screen. They actually have two different display options, one of which is a normal HD, and another, which I got, which is an IPS with 1900 x 1080 resolution. It really is brilliant. However, with a resolution this high on a relatively small screen, I had to do a lot of tweaking to get things to be the right size. I have it basically the way I want it now, but every once in a while there will be cases when I have an issue come up where things are not rendered at the right size, and I will have to deal with it. Don't get me wrong, it's a great machine, and like I said I would probably buy it again, but it has seriously made me wish for resolution independence in Linux. One should definitely be aware that this issue exists before thinking about getting one.
Of course, the one with the standard HD display would have no such issue. But I guess I would still rather spend a few days fiddling than sacrifice image quality. It's a matter of preference, though. Mileage may vary.
Anyway, I hope this helped!
Is the SSD in a standard drive format so it can be swapped for a bigger drive?
I'm running on an ASUS EeePC 2G Surf.
The 9" (800x600) screen is a little tight, but I can get a full install on here *IF* I dedicate the card in the SD slot to /usr.
With a big enough card (I've got a 32G in there right now), I can install anything I want, just be sure not to leave much in my /home folder. I have a /usr/share/myshare directory that I'm using as my "/home away from /home"
The 256M RAM is awfully tight as well. Can't use KDE (and besides, KDE loads my /home directory with megs and megs of config files), I use xfce instead. KDE tends to assume a larger screen than I have. Facebook will easily lock up my browser, but otherwise I've had no problem.
I've dedicated half of the internal 2G HDD as swap so I can hibernate. I just close my lid and go, open it back up and I'm back in business. Very convenient.
...and it fits in my jacket pocket. Can't beat that!
Last edited by leeeoooooo; 10-04-2013 at 06:49 AM.
Reason: more detail
interesting the ASUS 1215 is similar to my eeepc900 but a little bigger. I went to their site and looked at the 1015 but they are all limited to 2G ram, basically the same as I have now. Got a good laugh too as they are selling them with MSOffice pre-installed, my work assigned full size leveno laptop with 8G of RAM runs out of resources in Excel often so I know 2G would never work for MSoffice.
lenovo T430s 14" (intel graphic card)
I had an issue with the graphic card (random freezing)
which was solved by building a new kernel
Interesting, I installed Slackware-current (14.1) not too long ago on the same model and have had no issues with graphics. I haven't had time to do much tweaking yet, so later I'd like to play around w/ Bumblebee for more performance when needed. Thus far, graphics have worked fine out of the box w/ no issues. Anything you do to cause it to freeze (heavy graphics load, etc)? Perhaps a newer kernel is what you needed. Not all of my Fn combos work out of the box, however.
I've run Slackware 13.37, 14.0 and 14.1 on my MacBook Pro 17", Core i7, 8GB ram, 512Gb SSD. And it's been pretty great. 14.1 has been perfect from the time I installed it. I would imagine Slackware would run well on a MacBook Air as well. As for Apple's service, I spilled water on it the first year I had it, and they replaced the entire thing (was $4,500 new)no questions asked. And I've had the keyboard replaced one under warranty as well.
If you don't want Apple for sure, then I'm a Dell fan.
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