Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

#141

Post by sadga » Thu, Jul 19, 2012, 6:24 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #116

trekkin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, most of new laptops do not work out of the box with Ubuntu 12.04 - you need to manually compile and/or install a custom Linux kernel in order to avoid hanging, as it is documented here: http://partiallysanedeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/05/ivy-bridg... and here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2005305 . For some reason Canonical decided to sacrifice stability and focus on something most users don't th…

Couple of things - replace "majority of new" with "ivy bridge chipsets ". A lot of people actually buy sandy bridge or even AMD you know. Second, while I share somewhat common opinions on Unity, this particular example is a kernel bug. Most likely, ubuntu will backport those changes to 12.04 or has already provided a ppa for a newer kernel.

Sandy Bridge had the same sort of problem. It took a year to get Linux graphics working properly.

Re: Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

#142

Post by Ralith » Thu, Jul 19, 2012, 7:07 PM UTC

generalk wrote: post #117

Ralith wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that? It lacks most of the killer features.

Care to expand on that? Recall that Mac OS X is a certified UNIX, so I'm not sure what "unix-y" features it's missing.

The ability to replace the desktop environment without basically building a new OS from scratch, for one.

Re: Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

#143

Post by Ralith » Thu, Jul 19, 2012, 7:08 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #127

rosstafarian wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah what about something like the raspberry pi that doesnt even have built in storage?

Those are not full PCs you buy in a consumer shop.

If the definition is that specific, then the solution is simple; just don't sell them as "full PCs".

Re: Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

#144

Post by Ralith » Thu, Jul 19, 2012, 7:09 PM UTC

sigkill wrote: post #129

Ralith wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a programmer. I think he wants his keyboard to be not completely crap, too.

The reviews say that the Prime has a pretty good keyboard. I'm so tempted to buy this one, but I decided to skip this and wait for Haswell instead. I'm reasonably sure I can pull my Core 2 Duo/Penryn for another year.

Not the reviews I've read. In fact, they say just the opposite.

Re: Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

#145

Post by sigkill » Thu, Jul 19, 2012, 9:15 PM UTC

Ralith wrote: post #144

sigkill wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reviews say that the Prime has a pretty good keyboard. I'm so tempted to buy this one, but I decided to skip this and wait for Haswell instead. I'm reasonably sure I can pull my Core 2 Duo/Penryn for another year.

Not the reviews I've read. In fact, they say just the opposite.

Link? Or a name?

I'm talking about review from Mobiletecreview. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVK-9cPRTLw

Re: Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

#146

Post by rch » Thu, Jul 19, 2012, 9:43 PM UTC

ryangee wrote: post #135

rch wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this link - I have been searching for hardware along these lines for quite some time.

Don't forget System76. Their offerings are a bit slim at the moment since the line is being updated to Ivy Bridge: https://www.system76.com/laptops/ Or Ohava: http://www.ohava.com/openbook

My only problem with System76 is their focus on Ubuntu. I'm sure it is fine, and I am happy it is out there, but it isn't ideal for me.

Ohava is new to me though - thanks!

Re: Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

#147

Post by chimeracoder » Fri, Jul 20, 2012, 4:43 AM UTC

AlisdairO wrote: post #137

Ralith wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that? It lacks most of the killer features.

Once I've got homebrew or macports installed, I miss very little. What features do you find it lacking?

Without extreme modifications to the operating system and/or expensive third-party solutions:

Disabling the nauseating window-switching animations in Lion (not Snow Leopard), the ability to implement proper tiling window management (think wmii, not Divvy/Shift), focus-follows-mouse, arbitrary remappings of keys, mapping keyboard shortcuts involving the return/enter key, disabling the hardcoded built-in delay in the Caps Lock key, unified package management (homebrew != portage), unified binary package management (pacman != homebrew != portage), launching of 'applications' from a terminal without hunting down the location of the binary[1], renaming Documents/ and Downloads/ to their lowercase equivalents without breaking tab completion (seriously??), getting GNU screen/readline working in Terminal.app without really awkward line wrapping problems, the ability to access basic utilities (like system temperature) from the command line, upgrading system versions of things like the python interpreter (this may have been fixed), changing the resolution and font-size system-wide, scripting arbitrary window behavior in any language (again, think plan9/wmii), mounting /tmp in RAM the way tmpfs in Linux provides...

...that was just off the top of my head, but clearly there's quite a bit. Some of that is because it ships with a version of bash that's on the order of a decade old... but that's a problem in and of itself!

[1] Yet another example of how the concept of applications is broken on OSX - installing an application from a .dmg file is a completely different process from installing something via make install on a traditional (*)NIX.

Re: Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

#148

Post by AlisdairO » Fri, Jul 20, 2012, 9:06 AM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #147

AlisdairO wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I've got homebrew or macports installed, I miss very little. What features do you find it lacking?

Without extreme modifications to the operating system and/or expensive third-party solutions: Disabling the nauseating window-switching animations in Lion (not Snow Leopard), the ability to implement proper tiling window management (think wmii, not Divvy/Shift), focus-follows-mouse, arbitrary remappings of keys, mapping keyboard shortcuts involving the return/enter key, disabling the hardcoded built-in delay in the C…

Thanks for the response - honestly, though, aside from the inability to switch WM I'm not sure most of those things constitute the killer features of linux, so much as issues that will bug a relatively small number of people (with the caveat that for most people's purposes, I think homebrew or macports are good enough). You might group them under a larger heading of 'configurability'. Other bugbears are solved by third party applications (different terminal app, command line temperature app, etc).

It's fair to say that you might reasonably class such configurability as the defining killer feature of linux - and different people will be more or less willing to trade it off in favour of a lower-hassle experience.

Re: Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

#149

Post by SeppoErviala » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 11:29 AM UTC

einhverfr wrote: post #136

SeppoErviala wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have x220i and I needed to fix mic mute button [1] and add a power management script [2] for saving power while on battery. I still get some graphics corruption with gpu accelerated chrome but it's not too common and I can live with it. It would be nice if Lenovo or Dell would check how well their laptops (or even some model) worked with linux and tried to get this kind of stuff as default on major distros. [1] htt…

It gets a little complicated. I got a Lenovo g560 with an Ath9k wireless card, and installed Fedora 14 on it and everything worked. I upgraded to Fedora 16 and everything worked except the wireless card. Apparently there is no way to tell the OS anymore that the wireless card is turned on. Filing bugs with Fedora and asking on the ath9k-devel email lists got no help at all. What worked before no longer works. The car…

I know nothing about non-Thinkpad Lenovos and but with a quick googling I wouldn't put my money in one. As far as I'm concerned they might as well be Acer laptops.

When people say that Lenovo laptops work well with linux they mostly mean Thinkpad series and even then there are some exceptions. Best out-of-box experience will be with one that has intel cpu+intel wireless+intel gpu and was released a year ago. It's about as safe bet for a high quality fully working linux laptop as you can get.