Whew. Chris - sounds like way too much work. But then I don't use Gentoo....mostly because I don't want that much of a hassle. (Ask Jay McDonald - I create enough hassles all by myself.)
Damon - I put Ubuntu on an older Dell Laptop with almost no problems including taking care of screen resolution and it auto-detected and set-up an old Alverion wireless card. (802.11.b) connected to the internet and updated itself. Just my experience with Linux and Laptops. Dennis On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 18:44 +0000, christopher baus wrote: > > I just got my new HP laptop, don't know if any of you noticed it > > lastnight. I would like to turn it to a linux box, Gentoo most likely. > > This will be my first install of linux on a laptop. It there anything that > > I should be aware of that is different from a desktop install? > > > > Damon > > I've had a couple issues. X still doesn't automatically detect screen > resolutions and even common ones like 1640x1080 aren't in the defaut > x.conf. I've had to manually hack the x.conf to get RedHat to run > correctly on all 3 of my wide screen monitors. > > Wireless support IMHO is joke on linux. I've gotten it to work, but not > without major headaches: iwlist, iwconfig, edit > /etc/sysconfig/networks-scripts/ifcfg-x to add WAP keys, compiled drivers, > and use windows drivers on Linux. I've wasted hours of my life on this > stuff. This type of stuff might be fine for servers that don't change > configs often, I find it to be hell on a laptop where you are constantly > changing networks. > > I ended up maxing out my RAM and installing VMWare on XP, and that's the > config I'm using most of the time now. I know a lot of people here will > probably disagree, but is my opinion that XP is far better than Linux on > x86 Laptops. And I spend a lot of time keeping Linux boxes running in > production, and have been very happy with its performance in that domain. > > Unless you are developer interested in improving Laptop support for Linux, > I say save yourself the hassle, max out your RAM, and take a look at > VMWare. BTW, VMWare won't solve your problems with X resolutions. Still > requires manually hacking the config file. > > Just my experience. > > > > _______________________________________________ > RLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
