[Discuss] Recommended laptp distro?

[Daniel M German]

 Jason> I have a relatively new laptop (Lenovo X61 from this past summer) and I feel
 Jason> the same way sometimes.  I feel that each updated distribution versions
 Jason> requires some new hardware to go along with it regardless of what they say
 Jason> about it being faster!

I have a X60s and a X61Tablet.

 Jason> That being said, if you like Ubuntu and Fluxbox, you might want to give
 Jason> CrunchBang Linux a try.  Its a lightweight respin of Ubuntu with Openbox for
 Jason> the window manager and I guess some people are liking it alot.

 Jason> I'm quite happy with Fedora, but I kill of a lot of things that eat CPU and
 Jason> provide little value to me.  I am currently using a Gnome session, but if I
 Jason> were to use something like FVWM straight from my .xsession file, I know
 Jason> things would be quicker (I used to do this for years, then got lazy one
 Jason> day).


Ubuntu (I use 8.04) needs to be manually configured to fully take
advantage of the X series Thinkpads. For instance, I used to get 2-3
hours. Now I get in excess of 7 hrs with the x60 and between 5 and 6
with the X61.

Almost everything works for me. 

* Suspend (and before I upgraded memory, hibernate)
* ACPI buttons (volume, suspend, display brightness)
* Bluetooth
* Finger print reader
* tablet arrows
* "nipple" sensitivity
* Of course, wacom tablet display
* Autorotation
* Firewire

Some of the things that don't are the network LED, and the mute button
(the other two work as expected). I don't have an ultrabase.

One thing I DON"T use is gnome_power_manager. It gets on the way, and
the computer sometimes refuses to suspend. So first thing I do is
rename the executable (to avoid dependency problems). I have some
personal configuration in the ACPI directory to make sure things
happen they way I want.

Yes, restore is slow (10-15 seconds) but I can wait; and it only fails
when I rotate the display exactly as it is restoring (I think there is
a race condition in acpi there).

I use the X61t as my main computer, so really, I don't see a
performance problem with Ubuntu. It is fast enough for me.

 Jason> Unless you have a Thinkpad, I think getting these buttons to
 Jason> work could involve some work for you.  They largely work on
 Jason> Thinkpads out of the box cause there is a high usage of
 Jason> Thinkpads among Linux developers for some reason.  So as long

I think they are some of the best laptops in the market.

 Jason> as my employer is paying the bill, its a Thinkpad for
 Jason> me.. More things just work out of the box on them.

 Jason> By the way, Fedora hibernate and suspend have always worked for me out of
 Jason> the box.  Ubuntu's never have.

They both work for me (although since I upgraded memory I have been
having problems with hibernate, I need to find out what I have to do
to recreate the hibernation files).

 Jason> While I haven't used SUSE they have put in some work on laptop support with
 Jason> some custom hibernate stuff (I think) as well as some custom dock tools I
 Jason> guess.

 Jason> If your are i386 and leanness is your goal, I'd also consider ArchLinux.  It
 Jason> takes a little longer to tailer to your system, but is lightweight.  I'd
 Jason> probably still be running it except for the somewhat funny way it does
 Jason> multilib on x86_64, and I need that for work and have no time to fiddle with
 Jason> it.

 Jason> Jason


-- 
--
Daniel M. German                  
http://turingmachine.org/
http://silvernegative.com/
dmg (at) uvic (dot) ca
replace (at) with @ and (dot) with .