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Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

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Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#321

Post by sveiss »

userbinator wrote: post #235
aw3c2 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it meant as contra Linux though? Or just pro RAID?

RAID on a machine with a single SSD (and no provision to add another)? It'd make far more sense if the BIOS was setup so the RAID option was always disabled . Edit: it'd be rather amusing and saddening if this whole controversy was caused merely by someone misunderstanding/misreading a perfectly sensible requirement to disable the RAID mode, and instead disabled the other options. Given the level of communication flu…

The choice seems to be between AHCI and sorta-NVMe, with the latter enabled in 'RAID' mode.

Sure, real/standards-conforming NVMe would be better -- and wouldn't require driver shenanigans in either Windows or Linux -- but there should be a performance advantage to 'RAID' mode in this case.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#322

Post by Jugurtha »

phantom_oracle wrote: post #213

I see lots of folks referencing the Dell XPS laptops. Just as a FWIW, here is another option: https://system76.com/ As per my opinion on this, I'd rather see people not have knee-jerk reactions to Lenovo screwing up Linux support and people rushing for "alternatives", but rather make a concerted effort to support companies focused on Linux-supported hardware (for the long-term). Also, this story combined with the HP…

Thanks for the link, these seem pretty cool. I guess the reason people here recommend the Dell XPS is because it has features that appeal and are valuable to a certain demographic.

My first laptop was a Dell Latitude E6320. Inconspicuous. Magnesium and brushed aluminum. You wouldn't know until you touched it. SIM card slot where the battery fits, so 3G connectivity. Good plastics (firm and not wobbly, short travel distance up and down, gives it a "critically damped oscillation" feel). And, 180° opening. The keyboard and screen can be on the same plane. You can do many things with that and it's only when you try to work with a non 180° that you notice how great that feature is.

Example: Open it at slightly less than 180° on my lap, rotate it 90° counterclockwise, then rotate the PDF 90° clockwise. Now I have a sort of book with an 'A4'ish page on my left (the screen) and write on the notepad that's sitting on the keyboard. If I invert the colors on the PDF (page in black, text in white), it can be really nice.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#324

Post by sevensor »

Sylos wrote: post #229
akx wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might be misguided. Until there's an official announcement one way or another, I wouldn't pay too much attention to some random Lenovo customer service guy.

Right, but there isn't going to be an official announcement, unless a hundred thousand people jump to premature conclusions and bring out their pitchforks. I agree that it's not terribly smart to draw a conclusion at this point in time, but it's potentially more malicious, if we don't.

Regardless of whether such an agreement exists, and regardless of whether it's a secret if it does exist, I still have my pitchfork out. Lenovo had already lost my good will for their various other shenanigans over the last couple of years, but locking down the machine in a way that makes it impossible to install an alternative OS has decisively lost them my business.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#325

Post by leereeves »

UK-AL wrote: post #310
leereeves wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and someone, not a low-level tech, wrote that script and wrote the reply: > This system has a Signature Edition of Windows 10 Home installed. It is locked per our agreement with Microsoft.

They're probably only allowed to install windows at factory. Doesn't mean they've blocked it.

Are you saying the story is wrong and they haven't "locked [the SSD] in a proprietary RAID mode that Linux doesn't understand"?

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#326

Post by blihp »

pjmlp wrote: post #254
blihp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both wrong. The IBM PC was made by IBM in 1981 and it was absolutely not open. (Just hurriedly implemented using commodity parts so, other than the BIOS, it was pretty easy and legal to copy most of it) Then Compaq came along in 1982 and sold a clone of it... and in some ways it was even less open than the IBM. Neither one of those companies had any interest in the PC being 'open'. It was the 3rd party supplie…

Would it have happened if Compaq hadn't done a clean room reverse engineering?

I think so. Compaq just proved that it could be done without being bankrupted by an IBM lawsuit. IBM was the 800lb gorilla like Microsoft was in the 90's or Apple/Google are today. Being sued into oblivion was the real fear, not that it was technically a difficult job.

Some of the other companies I mentioned were the ones that followed Compaq's lead and did their own clean room versions which they then sold to everyone else who came flooding into the market.

As an aside, this was actually a problem for the first few years: take multiple independent clean room implementations, bake in some silly things that the manufacturers did with them (gotta customize, right?), and combine it with the bad programming practices of the day (i.e. programs written in assembly doing jumps into undocumented portions of the BIOS because, hey, it worked on the IBM and saved a few bytes/cycles or did something useful...) It was similar to how well web standards worked not too many years ago with multiple browser implementations doing/interpreting things slightly differently and developers doing things they shouldn't because they could... and that was with a public spec designed to be copied. Eventually things get worked out, but both had a rough start.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#327

Post by dest »

vlehto wrote: post #269
dx034 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they just wanted to lock out Windows 7/8. They don't gain anything by denying Linux to a few people. But preventing that the buyer can downgrade to Windows 7 fits exactly to their strategy and makes sense for Microsoft. Also, an agreement to lock out Linux might not be legal from an antitrust perspective, whereas an agreement to restrict usage to the current version of the OS is much less critical.

Why lock on 7? (Probably same reason than promoting free 10, but I didn't get that either.)

Microsoft prevents users from rolling back to Windows 7, maybe because Microsoft gets more data from its users with W10.

Data looks like the new business model of Windows.

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#328

Post by deviate_X »

beagle3 wrote: post #243
xg15 wrote: post #47

The other HN thread suggests this not actually a dark conspiracy by Microsoft but simply a case of missing linux drivers for the storage devices. This sounds believable to me. But I'll put my tinfoil hat on just for fun and pretend it was an intentional move. Could this make sense as a new twist on the old strategy, making it "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend"? With the WSL, they made it theoretically possible to run Linu…

More likely, it's a conspiracy against Win7/Win8 users, which hurts Linux users as collateral damage. What likely happened was the ms/lenovo deal was "And Lenovo will make sure win7 and win8 are not supported on laptop", which lenovo solved by switching the hard drive to a mode not even win10 supports, locking it that way (that's the evil part), and putting drivers for it on the lenovo install media, which are win10…

The problem with this conspiracy is that you can't install Windows 10 on the machine either ...

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#329

Post by vanderZwan »

wolfgke wrote: post #316
vanderZwan wrote: post #288

This looks like a timely moment to bring up Cory Doctorow's The coming war on general computation talk: > So today we have marketing departments who say things like "we don't need computers, we need... appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that…

> This looks like a timely moment to bring up Cory Doctorow's The coming war on general computation talk: One should also watch the (IMHO unfairly) less well-known sequel Fighting Back in the War on General Purpose Computers > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT6itfUUsoQ

Thank you, I missed that one myself!

Re: Linux can’t be installed on a recent Lenovo laptop

#330

Post by coldtea »

vlehto wrote: post #293
coldtea wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interestingly alcometer locks on cars and speed limiters are very rare. If the technology gets convenient and cheap enough, they might not be.

Car speed limiter is completely trivial, cheap and potentially life saving. "Most Japanese domestic market vehicles are limited to 180 km/h (112 mph) or 190 km/h (118 mph)." Almost twice the common maximum speed limit (100km/h).

And orthogonal to "alcometer locks". You can be lethal as a driver well under the maximum speed limit if drunk.
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