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Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

borretti.me

101–110 of 173 posts

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has a proprietary bootloader that Apple can lock in an OTA update. Also doesn't support Linux as well as Intel or AMD chipsets, unfortunately.

Last I heard asahi ran pretty well on M1/M2. Is that not the case?

It runs well but battery life is quite a bit worse than on macos.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#102
post #59
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a M2 equivalent ARM CPU/GPU (Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925), and comes with an arm64 Linux VM (Debian Bookworm) ready to go out of the box that supports most regular Linux apps built for ARM (including VSCode, Cursor, Claude code, etc). I use it for my software development daily driver. Battery life is amazing as you'd expect. I've even run local LLMs and have gotten 30…

"If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:" "Installing ubuntu on arm laptops is usually not easy, and the GPU drivers are unavailable in most cases (so, the performance is not great unless you use XFCE/LXDE/LxQt)" I do like to use the GPU, though.

[deleted]

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a guy who offers it for a very reasonable fee in USA. I’ve used his services a few times with great success! Email me, I wouldn’t want to post someone else’s contact info publicly.

This is exhibit A in why Apple needs to adopt 2230 NVMe drives and stop this ridiculous soldered flash storage scam.

Apple doesn't need that. Apple is very happy selling storage for 2-4x market rates.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#104
post #59
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a M2 equivalent ARM CPU/GPU (Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925), and comes with an arm64 Linux VM (Debian Bookworm) ready to go out of the box that supports most regular Linux apps built for ARM (including VSCode, Cursor, Claude code, etc). I use it for my software development daily driver. Battery life is amazing as you'd expect. I've even run local LLMs and have gotten 30…

"If ChromeOS's Linux VM doesn't suit you, you can replace ChromeOS with Linux with a bit of work:" "Installing ubuntu on arm laptops is usually not easy, and the GPU drivers are unavailable in most cases (so, the performance is not great unless you use XFCE/LXDE/LxQt)" I do like to use the GPU, though.

ChromeOS with the Linux VM is a surprisingly nice setup, I bought a Thinkpad Duet 3 so I could use Linux apps on a tablet and it seriously has me considering getting a Chromebook for my next laptop. Everything integrates so seamlessly and effortlessly that it does not even seem like a VM other than having to start up the VM. The Chrome keyboard has also really grown on me, even with the small and very cheap keyboard of the Duet 3. Battery life and performance is amazing and touch works completely as expected. Not sure if I can actually make the leap and give up Linux after 20 years of nothing but, but I am considering it.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#106
post #94
post #4

Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400. Things I learned to look out for: - Locked BIOS - Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it wa…

With the recent Intel layoffs many Linux drivers are no longer maintained and as a consequence some older laptops don't boot anymore.

Did upstream disable hardware.. I didnt see the memo for disabling anything boot related.

Can you tell me what you found breaking as I will have to deal with that.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#107
post #44
post #4

Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400. Things I learned to look out for: - Locked BIOS - Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it wa…

Can back this. Many years ago I purchased a Dell Latitude from eBay. After messing around with a 3D printer, there was a short of mains voltage onto the USB line, frying the laptop and tripping the house electrics. I contacted Dell asking for a schematic of the PCBs thinking that I had blown some components, but they informed me that the laptop was still under warranty thanks to the original business purchaser (by ju…

I really don't care for repairability as I average maybe 2 years before getting a new laptop.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#108
post #4

Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400. Things I learned to look out for: - Locked BIOS - Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it wa…

> Things I learned to look out for: Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in. When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chip…

In my experience Intel and AMD Thinkpads of that era are about the same for battery life but Intel always needs some kernel parameters set. Where I notice the biggest difference is Intel's integrated graphics gets you better battery life over anything AMD if your GPU needs are modest enough to be handled by Intel's integrated graphics

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#109
post #4

Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400. Things I learned to look out for: - Locked BIOS - Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it wa…

> Things I learned to look out for: Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in. When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chip…

Maybe what you are noticing is the "laptop on lap" detection? Check the bios, there was a "cool when on lap detected" mode on mine. Turn that off and re-test.

Re: Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729

#110
~12 years ago I installed Linux on Fujitsu UH572.

As an "ultrabook" it came with 16GB of fast SSD which could be used as a cache via some Windows-specific Intel feature, while main storage was a slower spinning disk.

As Linux did not support cache feature, I thought I can just format it as ext4 and use as a storage for things which can benefit from more iops, e.g. running DB tests. And as SSD technology was still rather new at that time, I started with running some IO benchmarks.

Well, it survived formatting into ext4 and few minutes of that IO benchmark, then it became permanently unresponsive.

My guess is that wear-leveling algorithm was designed specifically for the FS originally had (some version of FAT?), and different FS caused it to corrupt some internal data structure, so SSD's controller firmware went into panic on each boot.

Unfortunately, this added few minutes delay to boot as Linux tried to communicate with unresponsive SSD controller, but otherwise laptop worked fine...

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