Laptops For Suse

Hey, I have just installed SuSE 10.0 on a laptop and everything worked (almost) OOTB.

So I thought it would be good to let it know.
It would be nice also to have others experiences posted here with laptops fully working (or with minor annoyances -_-) so we can have a list to check.

Here's the one I've just installed:

ACER Aspire 3610

The good:
- Just boot from dvd and install. Everything detected, even atheros wifi. Online update via wifi during install worked nice.
- ACPI works perfectly also. Suspend to disk and Suspend to RAM too. All OOTB.

The probs:
- Monitor was identified weirdly enough for me. So I changed it to a VESA, JIC. Works.
- I don't know why but xorg.conf file was not completely right (maybe something I touched ) I had to swap mouse identifier in these two lines under "ServerLayout" section so they looked like this:

InputDevice "Mouse[1]" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Mouse[3]" "SendCoreEvents"

or Synaptics would error and X wouldn't start.

I have a Dell Inspiron 1200 that worked as well. Here are the specs.

Intel Celeron M 350 (1.3GHz/1MB)
256MB PC2100 DDR
40GB 4,200rpm Hard Drive
24x CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive
15" XGA LCD and Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900
AC'97 Audio
Internal Speakers and Line In/Out
v.92 56Kbps Modem and 10/100 Ethernet
Three USB 2.0 and One Type II PC Card
13" x 10.6" x 1.5" @ 6.6 lbs.

Installing Suse 10.0 was no problem. No changes had to be made for the install. Everything was left at their defaults. Some things I added later was 1GB of RAM and a wireless card. Installing new RAM worked with no problems. The two cards I tried, a Dell DW 1350 and a D-Link DWL-G650 both worked using ndiswrapper.

Pros:
-Install was easy. Everything was left at their defaults and I was up and connected to the internet in a very short amount of time.

Cons:
-Wireless support still needs some improvement.
-The mouse sometimes would make web browsers use the "back" or "forward" feature when I was browsing. I had to install the latest synaptics driver from here to resolve this issue.

Hey, thanks for colaboring, ceros.

see my sig, laptop may be old,Dell lattitude cpxj, but i've used suse from 7.0 to 10.0 with no problems

andy

Gateway M320.

Did not try firewire. Everything else works perfecty (I mean everything) in SuSE 10.0.

Padmal

Acer Ferrari 3200LMi

Everything except the Broadcom WLan is working absolutely fine on all SuSE version.

AMD64
DVDRAM
Bluetooth
4-in1 card reader
BC5788 Gigabit Lan
56K Modem
ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 (works perfectly with Xgl/Compiz on 10.1)
VIA AC97 audio
VIA Apollo K8T800 chipset

I have SuSE-10.0 installed on a Fujitisu-Siemens Amilo 7400 Laptop (previous to 10.0 I had 9.3 on the same laptop). Sound and graphics worked immediately upon SuSE-9.3 (and 10.0) install, without a problem. In fact, no problems to speak of, although because of my relative wireless newbie status, getting the wireless to work under SuSE was a bit of a bear (per post#19 in the following URL):
http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.ph...1703&hl=Fujitsu

Hi, I have an Acer Travelmate 2301LC Notebook.
specs are:
Celeron 1.3GHz, 15" XGA TFTLCD, 80Gb hdd
DVDR-CDRW combo, 1gb DDR ram (I love it for going away)
Its got a multiboot of win XP (for things Suse can't do)
And Suse 10.0.

It took Suse 10.0 from a magazine without a problem - nothing needed tweaking. I don't use wireless networking on my notebook so I don't know how that would go. At home the notebook just plugs into my home network and bingo -- It's connected.
And I tested a few other distros too. Mandriva 2006 was the only other distro that went straight on as well as Suse 10.0 But I couldn't keep mandriva because it costs significantly more to pay the Mandriva Club tax than it does to pay the Micro$oft tax. I have a real anger problem with that, and it pushed me to Suse which I just love -- so pro, so slick, so just plain works.

I have to keep WinXP because that gives me great Internet access when I travel, using EVDO wireless, which I can't get working in Suse. It's a pain doing everyday work on Suse and rebooting to WinXP to get on the internet. This is not a notebook problem or a Suse problem. It's a Linux problem which goes to show that Linux is just not ready for wide scale adoption by the public market.

I believe that an ordinary user wouldn't tolerate Linux on a notebook for a minute in my situation. But you see, I'm unusually hooked by Linux. And when I get home, the problem disappears because I have cable broadband at home.

Enough for now/cheers
swerdna

I have to keep WinXP because that gives me great Internet access when I travel, using EVDO wireless, which I can't get working in Suse. It's a pain doing everyday work on Suse and rebooting to WinXP to get on the internet. This is not a notebook problem or a Suse problem. It's a Linux problem which goes to show that Linux is just not ready for wide scale adoption by the public market.[/b]

I have the same experience with wireless, in that when travelling, WinXP wireless configures easy, while I'm a newbie in the dark when it comes to linux wireless.

BUT having typed that, I found ethernet 10/100 baseT hardwired Internet connection works better on my Laptop's SuSE, than the same on WinXP. In Bankgok Thailand, in our hotel, SuSE immediately recognized the hotel's 10/100 baseT connection and I was surfing in seconds. But when my wife rebooted to WinXP, it took her an hour to configure it. And then in my hotel in Beijing China (18 months ago) I immediately had SuSE on the internet to the hotel's 10/100 baseT connection, but couldn't get WinXP to connect at all.

An ancient Dell Inspiron 8100 that has held up well through the years.

PIII 1.13G, 384MB, nVidia 32MB

Linux is very well supported on this laptop, I've never had an issue with hardware across several different distros. Although I should add I've never tried using the firewire or modem ports, though they're reported as being recognized with appropriate modules loaded.

Only two "gotchas" I've run into... One, ACPI Suspend, which used to work flawlessly. The first couple of distros I ever installed on this (FC3, Kubuntu Hoary) suspended pretty much the first time I closed the lid.

Unfortunately, newer distros tend to add more and more scripts, utilities and workarounds in order to better support suspend. These, without fail, break suspend on my laptop and I generally have to hack around to disable all the "helpers" to try and boil everything down to a simple echo mem > /sys/power/state.

At some point in the 2.6.xx evolution, I also had to start using nvidia's own AGP driver and disable the intel one in order to ensure suspend works. Although that's the recommended method anyways, I never needed to initially.

The second little gotcha was with the speedstep-smi kernel module for cpu throttling. It causes regular "stuttering" on my desktop, the simple workaround to that is using the acpi cpufreq module for throttling. Works well and handles throttling perfectly, without requiring a userspace utility.

It's also worth pointing out that this laptop has had and still receives heavy useage over the four plus years I've had it. I have a slick little HP laptop for work, but this is still the one I primarily use, this bad boy has probably averaged 8-10 hours of *daily* use over the years I've had it.

I've killed the keyboard twice with spilled coffe, and in both cases Dell shipped me replacement keyboards the next day for around $25. Took five minutes to swap out and replace using a standard screwdriver. (To put a small point like that in perspective, my boss did the same thing with her Toshiba laptop around the same time I first did it, and it required a $300 depot repair to replace the keyboard, there was no DIY option).The HDD also died a while back, which is unsurprising given the useage I've put this machine through, but it was easy enough to replace. The original was a 5400rpm (I opted up over a 4200rpm when I bought the system), and I replaced it with a 7200rpm drive which has had a noticeable though not dramatic impact on performance.

I know people like to slag Dell for their gear, but I've been more than happy enough with this laptop that I likely won't hesitate to buy a Dell again, as long it has nVidia.

Cheers,
KV