Linked by Will Gunadi on Tue 5th Apr 2005 14:11 UTC
Today, there is no shortage of reviews on Linux on the Desktop, but I think we can benefit from more "Laptopized-Linux" experiences. As laptops keep dropping in price and increasing in terms of computing power, they really make a nice platform even for cpu intensive applications such as sofware development, desktop publishing, web design, etc. And as you will see in this article, installing Linux on a laptop is not as hairy as you may think.
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I've installed Linux on a number of Laptops recently though have generally used Mandrake. This article doesn't actually focus so specifically on issues unique to laptops.
As far as Linux on laptops goes... APM seems to work pretty well all around, ACPI, on the other hand, is a fickle beast. It turns out that many hardware vendors have bugs in their ACPI implementations and include in their OEM Windows install work-arounds. Fat chance that will help you Linux users.
Most PCMCIA cards, USB, and Firewire devices seem to automagically configure themselves just fine and I've had less isues with hardware under Linux than WinXP at this point (I never actually check ahead of time what support the OS theoretically has for it; these days I expect all hardware to come with a working XP driver and that if there isn't Linux support, someone's working on it and I can use the interim driver). Case in point, I just got a D-Link G650 802.11a/b/g card that include XP drivers. Installing under XP was not smooth (some issues with XP's ZeroConf implementation and the G650 driver fighting for control; ultimately it required configuration using the D-Link utility, but then switching to XP to manage the connection). Under Linux, I googled for a driver, found madwifi.org, and downloaded the driver. It took about 1/4th the time to install and get up an running.
Hibernate? That's an ACPI/APM issue and also requires disk partitioning to setup (which this author might not have realized). So far, Linux can hibernate on most laptops, but not all. Under both Linux and Windows, the support can be flakey and varies depending on the model (my Wife's Compaq Presario w/ WinXP SP2 can recover from hibernate about 80% of the time).
Battery life also depends. My experience is that if you can find a laptop where ACPI works under Linux, the battery life will generally be about 20-50% longer under Linux, depending on what you are doing (there are difference in the way the two operating systems handle caching of I/O and idling that account for the difference).
Other than that, I've never had issues with any features on a laptop (TV out, external displays, etc.) All seem to function as you'd expect. I've never tried a tablet PC, however, so I can't comment on the touch-screen.