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Zorak

Zorak

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Mar 20, 2006
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So I just picked up a new laptop for the start of school, and I am pretty excited about it because it has decent hardware, and I got it for about the same price as a netbook! (I got a Compaq Presario CQ60-206us in case anyone is curious). My only real requirements were that it has just enough hardware to play HD video w/o dying, that it had a wireless card so that I could ssh back to my tower at home, and that it could run linux (and be cheap as I am a starving student), and on all those points it certainly meets expectations!

The only hitch seems to be a few Linux issues that I've had along the way... At first, I couldn't get the 64bit version of ubuntu 8.10 installed. Booting the liveCD would cause the entire system to freeze during the boot process. It turns out that this was caused by a problem with the wireless drivers that are on the installation disks for Ubuntu. So, the fix was to use the alternate install disks and at the end of the installation, instead of rebooting immediately, I switched to a different virtual console and edited my /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and blacklisted all the atheros drivers. I could then boot the system properly. To fix the fact that I couldn't use my wireless card, I downloaded and installed ndiswrapper and the windows driver. This seems to work ok for the most part, but sometimes it is flaky, so I hope they come out with a better native driver soon. The weird part about this driver problem though was that I was able to install the 64bit version of ubuntu 8.10 on my dad's laptop without this problem and we have the exact same wireless adapter (AR5007).

The next little bit of weirdness becomes manifest when I try to use compiz. The best way for me to describe what happens is that the display doesn't seem to update correctly. For example, whenever I try clicking around in nautilus, nothing seems to happen for some odd reason, although firefox and a couple other programs seem to work ok. Also, if I am using vim and I move the cursor down or up the page, instead of the proper behavior, the line the cursor is on suddenly changes to look like the line above or below where the cursor is. This doesn't happen when I use metacity, however, so I am thankful for that. I think it is a compiz problem, but I won't discount the possibility that it could be an nvidia driver problem.


In spite of these little setbacks, I still like this machine as it has hardware enough to do what I want (hardware good enough even to run vista without choking!), and it was SO CHEAP. Unfortunately, for the forseeable future, this machine will have to remain a windows/Linux dual boot machine as I don't know when I will need windows for school, but I think when I graduate I will wipe windows and either give its partition to Linux or maybe I will try out FreeBSD. Also, I'd eventually like to move this machine to Gentoo as well, but I haven't had time to do that as I literally picked up this machine before class on my first day of this semester and I needed a working Linux environment ASAP.

I hope I didn't bore anyone, I just figured I'd share the excitement 😀

-Zorak
 
So far, so good, with the caveats of the wireless driver and the compiz problem.

I have been using that machine to do programming for my classes, and it has a screen that makes it just big enough to be useful, and yet small enough to be portable. So, it is a relatively good tradeoff. Overall, I'd say it is a pretty darn good little machine, and I am really enjoying the fact that I got this much value so cheaply.

I have also used it to watch some HD videos on the bus home, and it has performed well without so much as a stutter. The only place where it will start stuttering a bit is whenever I try to watch an HD youtube video, and it stutters much less noticeably under windows than linux, so I will chalk that up to an evil version of flash for linux (which may be remedied in the future w/ the 64bit version they are rolling out for linux in the near future). Hopefully adobe could find some way to make flash a little less CPU bound and accelerate it w/ hardware graphics, but this is something that is entirely out of my hands and even getting off on a tangent...

So, to recap, great value, and great price! Glad I finally have a sleek looking Linux machine to cancel out some of the bad karma brought on by the plethora of mactards on campus 😉

--Zorak
 
I think it goes something like this...

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I have a Wubi install of Ubuntu 8.10 on my rarely used in 7 partition :na: I first tried running Wubi off a logical partition which didn't work out so well with GRUB :kaola:

I haven't done much with it, I just installed it to see if this is the first version with which I could get NVIDIA drivers loaded without half-installed packages bricking the package manager. 8.04 didn't show up any available restricted drivers for my 9600GT earlier last year. 8.10 took a few attempts at "activating" the driver before it actually worked.

I now have 3 Windows OSs and one Linux OSs all on the one HDD, as well as logical partitions for the page file and games. Partitioning nightmare!
 
I just used the partitioner in Windows Vista as that is my main OS, with Win XP for Fallout 3 (didn't start in Vista) and Win 7 for... taking up space? I ran out of primary partitions for Ubuntu :lol:
 
The next time you install look into LVM, it kicks #&& :)

You can make 1 PHY Partition and put a number of LVs on it for several Linux versions, swap, home, etc.

Windows supposedly has LVM support too but I've never used it on windows.

:)
 

Haha, I guess the person was a bit afraid to post.

I think I should play around with Ubuntu a bit more. I know almost nothing about Linux because I just haven't used it. I've really only ever used Windows OSs, such that I find them easier to use than OSX even though people say OSX is for dumbies :sol: Really it comes down to not finding a use for it because Windows does everything (which is why it's such a huge OS).
 
Linux is a heck of a good server OS :) It doesn't do too bad in the workstation segment either.

All kinds of devices run Linux including HTPCs, DVRs, mobile phones and various gadgets and appliances and the list is growing rapidly as more people become aware of the advantages :)

The game industry is dragging their feet because they think they make more money by sticking with micro######.
 
My real problem is the learning curve, as well as the still-mediocre wireless support. Ubuntu was reporting a 15% connection strength with at least one dropout while I was using it. I rarely drop-out on Windows and I get a much better signal than that (provided both report strength with some accuracy).

The gaming industry drags their feet with everything, including multi-core support. It's only now starting to take off, and people can run 8 threads already with a single-CPU system, soon to be more than that. If they worked on Linux games more then graphics card manufacturers would give Linux driver support a higher priority too. But without faster driver support as cards get released, gaming is not much of an option for people who buy cards at launch. So it's a Catch-22, and either the game devs or driver devs need to make the first step into breaking that cycle.
 
Wireless is problem on most operating systems, even on windows ( perhaps less so ). There are a lot of wireless chipsets that are complete junk.

Besides the poor quality of the equipment, many manufacturers refuse to release specs so that the developers can write good drivers. You can expect issues with hardware that had to be entirely reverse-engineered.

You can avoid a lot of problems if you shop around for hardware that has good Linux support.

Linux isn't perfect, but it definitely has some key advantages, there is no activation, no nag screens, no DRM, it's fast, very stable, relatively very secure, free -- legally ( $0 ) and open source.

So there's a lot to like :)

With the accelerated drivers and compiz it can also have fast, high quality 3D with a lot of eye candy too :)

Recently Ubuntu was benchmarked again windows 7 and I believe it beat it in most benchmarks :)

You can also rest assured that if something isn't working right now, someone is probably working on it.

WINE is also improving rapidly and supports many popular games and apps and in some cases the programs run better on WINE than they do on certain versions of windows.

http://appdb.winehq.org/

http://www.cedega.com/gamesdb/

Good stuff :)
 
Almost anyone from a 5 year old to an 85 year old grandmother can use Linux for basic tasks without much trouble. It is not necessary to know all the OS internals to use it :)

Windows usually prevents you from using your computer and your hardware and software, Linux enables you to do things :)

If there's something you don't like you can change it yourself if you have the skills, if you don't, you can hire someone to do it for you or start your own open source project to make the changes.
 
Unfortunately, your mileage will vary with WINE ( free -- $0 ) and Cedega ( $5 / mo or $35 / year ).

Fortunately support is available both free and non-free.

Games that have native Linux versions will essentially always run better than those running under WINE or Cedega.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_games#Commercial_games

Basic tasks such as web browsing, email, office apps, graphics, im, and the like usually run nearly flawlessly using Firefox, Thunderbird, openoffice.org / koffice / abiword, GIMP, pidgin, etc. respectively.

:)
 
Definitely :)

tux games http://www.tuxgames.com/ has some commercial Linux games. Some are oldies but goodies :)

Some of these games have free demos you can download.

http://www.linuxgames.com/

Naturally Linux has dozens of games you can get absolutely free, but they are usually not as flashy as commercial games :)
 
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