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Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

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Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#61

Post by mbubb »

Hello

My HP 6510b has run every version of Ubuntu since 8.04. I put a 12 cell travel battery on it when I travel so it is a bit heavy. 4GB RAM. Usually run xfce. I am a sysadmin so often have a handful of xterms open and VirtualBox running XP for vSphere, etc. chrome open with HN in the background. Jabber session or two.

I really cannot say enough about this laptop. Not pretty at all but durable.

Everything works - except the fingerprint reader which I have never cared about to get to work.

It has been great. Currently am on Ubuntu 10.10/ xfce. Have used this laptop since 2007 - initially had Win2k on it.

the current incarnation is the 6550b: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13616_ca/13616...

  My lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)

00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)

00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)

00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)

00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)

00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)

00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)

00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)

00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)

00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)

02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b6)

02:04.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 02)

10:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)

18:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5787M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#62

Post by bradleyland »

kls wrote: post #49
trevelyan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu runs hot on the MBP and will chew through your battery power even if you aren't running it in a VM. So MacOS is Unix anyway, you say? Too bad the default libraries are a pain to upgrade, trivial applications like "locate" and "wget" are missing and you'll have to manually configure stuff like page up/page down if you want the terminal to be useful. I've had repeated issues compiling different "cross platform"…

So MacOS is Unix anyway, you say? I don't recall saying that it is or is not in my post above. Please don't put words in my mouth. but it is not nearly as good a platform for developers as Ubuntu by any means you are painting a pretty broad stroke there. I do web and mobile development, both require application like Photoshop, professional video editing tools while web specifically Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and…

Just a heads up, you can feel perfectly confident saying that OS X is Unix. Snow Leopard is UNIX 03 certified.

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3581.htm

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#63

Post by balu »

I just switched to Ubuntu again - on a two year old Macbook Pro 4,1 though.

To tell a bit about the software side on a Mac: As long as you don't mess with the system, it runs nicely. Recently I wanted to have a look at clutter ("software library for creating (...) graphical user interfaces") which depends on newer versions of the libraries that ship with OS X. After fiddling around with building it myself (or building Formulae for Homebrew which is a simple and nice package manager for OS X) I decided to go with Ubuntu and Awesome as my window manager. There was just too many barriers in the way. For web development, OS X was nice. Unfortunately I'm also toying around with a lot of music software which rarely has an OSS equivalent.

Some points on Apple hardware: The build quality is very nice. It might not have the latest stuff, but all components they ship are well integrated and usually don't get you into hassle (as long as you stick with OS X). I honestly don't want to miss the multitouch trackpad.

Conclusion: If you can live with the system that OS X is, go for it. Perhaps you'll get pissed some day about the missing freedom some day. Don't expect that the hardware in a MacBook will fully supported in a Linux distro

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#64

Post by [deleted] »

mbubb wrote: post #61

Hello My HP 6510b has run every version of Ubuntu since 8.04. I put a 12 cell travel battery on it when I travel so it is a bit heavy. 4GB RAM. Usually run xfce. I am a sysadmin so often have a handful of xterms open and VirtualBox running XP for vSphere, etc. chrome open with HN in the background. Jabber session or two. I really cannot say enough about this laptop. Not pretty at all but durable. Everything works - e…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#65

Post by bradleyland »

c1sc0 wrote: post #53
trevelyan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu runs hot on the MBP and will chew through your battery power even if you aren't running it in a VM. So MacOS is Unix anyway, you say? Too bad the default libraries are a pain to upgrade, trivial applications like "locate" and "wget" are missing and you'll have to manually configure stuff like page up/page down if you want the terminal to be useful. I've had repeated issues compiling different "cross platform"…

I've been using Macs as my development machines since before Darwin became OSX and that's the only thing that frustrates me sometimes: decent package/library management like on Linux. I've resorted to isolating these issues in VMs running Linux. Anyone else has a better approach? Do you --PREFIX everything you compile? This can be particularly painful for academic software: this type of soft has the annoying tendency…

Is using prefix really all that annoying? I run Ubuntu as well as OS X, and I like to keep my compiled software segregated from my package installed software. This means I "prefix everything". I mean really, using --prefix is minor in contrast to some of the other difficulties encountered when compiling software.

Homebrew has advanced the state of package management on OS X significantly. Anyone considering a Mac laptop should look in to it to see if the packages you need are there.

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#66

Post by roedog »

Symmetry wrote: post #5

Pretty much everyone I know who runs Linux on their laptop uses a Thinkpad. They don't come with Linux installed but they tend to have good driver support and pretty good quality. You might also consider system76, but I don't have experience with those. EDIT: I'm currently running Linux on my T410. Suspend was broken with Ubuntu 10.4, but everything works perfectly now with 10.10.

Speaking of longevity of the brand, my backup system is an old IBM Thinkpad T42 (circa 2004). It runs Ubunutu 10.04 fine. Sure it's not super fast, but the keyboard is still solid. The screen is a bit dim, but it always was. My next buy will be a thinkpad.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#67

Post by khandelwal »

samstokes wrote: post #7
Symmetry wrote: post #5

Pretty much everyone I know who runs Linux on their laptop uses a Thinkpad. They don't come with Linux installed but they tend to have good driver support and pretty good quality. You might also consider system76, but I don't have experience with those. EDIT: I'm currently running Linux on my T410. Suspend was broken with Ubuntu 10.4, but everything works perfectly now with 10.10.

Got a T510 here (with the extra-high-res 1920x1080 display) and it's great. Everything works in Ubuntu 10.04 (I don't have any problems with suspend-to-RAM or -to-disk). I spent a while looking into MBPs and it seems the Linux support is still fairly laughable - the latest models won't even boot it, and even the older ones require a kernel recompile to get sound working. I'd buy an MBP without hesitation if I wanted…

Is there a particular wireless chipset I should choose that works better with Ubuntu? Options seem to be: ThinkPad bgn Wireless and then various Intel Centrino variants.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#68

Post by Jun8 »

I went through the same exact process you are going through a few months ago, my manager wanted to replace our laptops with new, Linux-based ones and asked us what to get. I switched to a 15" MBP, being never a Mac person before.

The first week or so was painful. Mac OS wasn't as intuitive as I though it would be and it may be hard to find how to do things as a power Linux user. But after that initial learning curve, god it's good. Just the hardware itself is worth it, the feel, and of course the screen, which is one of the most important parts of a laptop I think. Finding and installing packages is OK with Homebrew (or MacPorts), not as intuitive as apt perhaps, though.

I have friends using a Thinkpad and if you ask me again today, I would definitely repeat my decision to go with the MBP. Maybe you're giving away a wee bit of Ubuntu goodness but you gain tremendously from hardware and being able to use other Mac software, which is very very good.

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#69

Post by yummyfajitas »

If you want to do development in a language other than python/ruby, or even want to use python libraries written in c, avoid the macbook. If you are certain you will stick to {svn, git, django, python, vim}, you'll be fine. My mac ownership timeline:

Day 1: Ooh, pretty.

2-3 days: I fucking hate iTunes. Luckily ports install mpd works.

1 month: Ooh, the pretty magsafe connector saved me from dropping it when I tripped over the wire.

1.5 months: Arrgh, finally numpy works.

2 months: I miss XMonad.

3 months: Fuck, random C/C++ library (e.g., amqp_lib, boost for a while, quantlib, some Fortran medical imaging libraries) doesn't work. Or maybe it would work if I messed around with it more. Neither do many Haskell libraries (e.g. HFuse). I never managed to get postgres working either, though I've heard others have.

4 months: I want to get work done. Open up virtualbox, boot ubuntu server in a VM.

2 years later: load linux onto a thinkpad. Woohoo!

[edit: I am being a little unfair to the macbook. It has one fantastic feature which I still miss: keynote + LaTeXit + that little remote control. This makes pretty and very effective scientific presentations. OpenOffice Impress is not in the same league. It's less relevant to me now, since I'm no longer an academic mathematician.

Also, I don't mean to be unduly negative on macs. They just didn't satisfy me as a development box.

Lastly, things might have changed recently. I gave away my macbook early this year.]

Re: Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

#70

Post by qjz »

mahmud wrote: post #47
mironathetin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot go wrong with a Thinkpad, but you can do better, IMHO. I enjoyed my last Thinkpad (t40) a lot. Still have and use it after 6 years. But especially with linux, battery life wasn't very good (now the battery is completely dead of course). The fan never stopped. To answer the question of the OP: yes, it is totally worth to learn Mac OS. First, the effort is small. Second, you will save a lot of admin time. Th…

The battery part is actually true, but I thought it was only me because I use older TP models. My girlfriend's HP gets at least half a day. I don't think she even bothers to charge it during the day. But hers is a crap laptop with lousy, fragile keys; short screen (WTF IS THAT?) that's twice as wide than it's tall, and sucks for everything but listening to music.

I loved my T41p. It was so pleasant to use that it became my main workstation. Unfortunately, the battery stopped holding a decent charge and the fan stopped completely. Since Macs were growing in popularity, I needed one for testing, so I made the switch to a 17" MBP. It was rough at first (I really miss the pointing stick, extra trackpad buttons, and the incredible range of the hinge on the T41p), but after three years, I'm still impressed by the design and quality of the MBP. Most other laptops seem old and clunky by comparison. As for Linux development, VMWare or VirtualBox allow you to run multiple distributions and you can back up images for easy restoration. As for common open source tools on the Mac itself, MacPorts has the essentials and more.
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