Fully functioning linux laptop?

[phidia]

I'm not going to put this out perfectly-but I'm curious about several somewhat complex laptop issues. I also think this might be useful to the community here because the question of what laptop to use with linux keeps coming up on the forums.

From being here and reading many laptop threads it appears that the consensus is that intel equipped laptops are the most trouble free and easily configured. By intel equipped I mean intel cpu, gpu, & wireless card. There are of course reports of problems with intel based laptops but generally they are easier to get fully functioning*. Fully functioning here means all of the features the laptop supports work.

To attempt to learn more I'm creating a poll. Basically linux, not necessarily Ubuntu & variants, has worked for you on a laptop and also honestly all the features of the laptop work or they don't. I know that there is a laptop testing page for Ubuntu but there is not enough specific info at that wiki IMO.

Once people, hopefully, vote on the poll I think it would be very useful if they also post comments with specific hardware that was a problem or worked well. Commenting about biases is fine too.

I have an older Apple Powerbook that I'm using right now-it just works. I also have a lot of open source on it and even ran linux on it through Apple's X11. My expectation was to get linux working on a laptop as well as my Powerbook works-trying to do just that with a HP Pavilion dv6707us it never happened.

[sergiom99]

I voted "Linux works completely with my laptop-I will post my hardware specifics" b/c, AFAIK, the only thing that's not working is the MS card reader, but there's no kernel support for them yet, so everything is ok.

[SpaceCowboyMA]

Dell Latitude 630 (Model PP18L - A06 BIOS)

Only issue I've found is WEP via network-manager, but WiFi hardware is fine (can do Open or WPA APs no problem).

Attached my dmesg, package and source lists...

[jacobh]

-- linux works partially, posting specific problems --

ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics card doesn't really work. It works if you completely turn off desktop effects, but otherwise you get flickering graphics in OpenGL applications I think.

Sound was extremely difficult to get working correctly, and I still have problems with it. Can't play sound in games and in Songbird simultaneously. Something about my particular motherboard that doesn't work too well with ALSA.

But despite this, I managed to get Linux working on a laptop without any prior experience or excessive computer skills, and I enjoy it much more than I did Windows. Performance is way up as well.. everything loads and closes much quicker. However, battery time took quite a drop (but I think it's just because I haven't installed any power-saving options or applications - any ideas?).

[jimv]

Gateway MT3814

Problems that had to be resolved, but are fine now:

Wireless card is RTL8185, needs Ndiswrapper to work.
Brightness keys didn't work until I patched DSDT by replacing "Windows 2006" with "Linux"

[stchman]

I have the Toshiba A205-S5859. Everything works.

[aysiu]

My previous laptop, which I've since given away worked perfectly with Ubuntu out-of-the-box. It was a Dell Inspiron 500m. The only thing I'll say is that when I bought it, it didn't have a wireless card inside. So I made sure to buy a Linux-compatible wireless card when I got one (Intel Pro Wireless 2200, thanks to recommendations from these forums).

I know run an Eee PC. Don't know if it counts as a laptop. It ran perfectly with Xandros as preconfigured by Asus. I installed eeeXubuntu on it, which included some Eee-specific tweaks, and it works almost perfectly, except that the boot time is now extremely slow, and resume from suspend doesn't work all the time any more.

[Fire_Chief]

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with Hardy running strong on it. I have not configured the fingerprint scanner or the function hotkeys and don't use the IR port so I'm not sure if it works or not. Other than that, the system is fantastic!

[adamogardner]

hi this is my first computer and everything works great! All the troubles I had setting up were due to my ignorance and nothing with the computer or operating system. It's a Pavillion DV6700. Very handsome machine too.

[tamoneya]

problem free so far. Lenovo T61.