Review: LinuxCertified LC2210 Laptop

'It's me' writes "OSNews reviews LinuxCertified's LC2210 laptop, which comes with Xandros Desktop 2.0. That laptop is meant to be 100% certified with Linux, but Xandros seemed to have problems with it (namely there is no "sleep" function, while WiFi was not as robust as users would want it). LinuxCertified said that newer distros should be able to support this laptop with no hickups. The reviewer concludes that this a great purchase, as long as you are more selective over the distro installed."

Re:Power management

[dot-magnon]

Power management and all these kinds of functions are well supported by Linux itself and the GUI systems. The problems are hardware inconsistency, that makes it very hard to provide non-proprietary drivers. There's no hardware vendor that provide you with linux drivers for their odd power management systems.

Re:There is no "sleep"

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux has by far better sleep support. It shuts down my monitors automatically and it doesn't crash when I move the mouse / press a key afterwards.
Also, I can do a hdparm -y /dev/hdx anytime to spindown a disk. Real handy. hdparm -Y /dev/hdx makes it shutdown completely until a reboot so be careful with that.
The hibernate function came a little late because, well, who needs that? Most of the time the PC keeps running 24/7 just so the user can always ssh to it.

There are several issues with hibernating, like the clock not ticking (obviously) so you'd need to ntpdate on each resume.

Anyway, this may be a big step forward. I hate those Windows stickers. Maybe we'll see models with Penguin stickers on them in stores in a few years so people can say 'Oh how cute it comes with this lovely fat penguin on it!' :)

Re:Power management

[Dever]

You know, having installed linux on my laptops (compaq cx1000 and vaio grt160) and moved on from APM to ACPI daemon, i've had excellent power management. i've got my prism2 based wlan cards working fine, and can use powermanagement fine (S1...).

You can even get custom DSDT's (Differentiated System Description Table, config info about the underlying system) for many laptops that have broken implementations (the bane of linux compatibility in most cases imo). It's not perfect yet, but it's come really far.

A good distro for seeing if bits and pieces work on newish laptops (read:after2001 or so) quickly is suse. i slap it on a 2 gig partition and see what happens.

although in the case of suse and many others until recently, centrino wlan was not doable

Re:Power management

[prockcore]

Power management and all these kinds of functions are well supported by Linux itself and the GUI systems. The problems are hardware inconsistency,

That's true. The power management on PPC Linux for powerbooks works wonderfully. Probably because the power management for powerbooks is all the same.

By wonderfully I mean that the LCD will dim after a few minutes of being idle, it will suspend after 10 minutes of being idle, it will suspend and wakeup correctly when the lid is shut and opened.

Re:Advantages ?

[jole]

Moreover, the offered SXGA+ screen does not work with Linux. It is ridiculous that some basic parts (like screen and power management) of a 'Linux-certified' laptop just don't work. IMHO Intel is shooting itself on the foot by not supporting its own hardware. I hope that AMD comes up with a good, supported competitor for Centrino ASAP.

For those wanting to have a working UNIX-laptop, I would recommend buying a PowerBook or an iBook instead of Linux-laptop. Everything works like charm - just apt-get it with fink. Only downsides are the G4 (when compared to Pentium-M) and low screen resolutions (when compared to SXGA+ or better screens offered on PC:s). Even the pricing is nowadays competitive with comparable PC:s.

Dell Inspiron 600m

[mcrbids]

It works!

Really, though. For my needs, it's AWESOME. I use Fedora C1.

X works out of the gate, as expected. CHECK

Sound works with the base install, as expected. CHECK

Network card works immediately, as expected, at 1 Gb. (w00t!) CHECK

CD-Burner works immediately, as expected. CHECK

DVD works simply by updating /etc/yum.conf with the offshore repositories that have decsslib. CHECK

ACPI power management and CPU throttling (with cpudyn) works easily. (had to google to find that I had to put "acpi=force" on the linux line in grub.conf) CHECK

USB stuff works as expected in the base install. I've hot swapped my mouse and a digital camera - both work instantly and easily. CHECK

What's left?

1) The modem is a funky broadcom chipset that's not supported by linmodem or pctel drivers. I have an old 33.6 3com pcmcia modem card that works fine. =/

2) Wireless with the Intel 2200 BG chipset is spotty, if at all. (so far, unable to confirm operation using ndiswrapper [sourceforge.net]) =/

3) I haven't yet gotten it to see my Verizon Cell phone as a modem to use it for anytime/anywhere/slow service in those rare cases it's needed. For now I'll boot into WinXP when this is needed. =/

Given the problem - that of allowing me to retain the functional capacity of my 2 Ghz Athlon Desktop system in a laptop, it's a resounding success, allowing me to retain my productivity just about anywhere.

Would I *LIKE* wireless? Would I *LIKE* modem w/o card? Sure I would - and I'm still not convinced that wireless won't work.

But the primary issue for me is productivity - not necessarily having every last bell and whistle.

Oh, and I did use 9 of the 60 GB of disk space to keep the copy of XP Home running in those rare cases that I really do need it. (Hello wireless)

This is why geeks are starting to use Powerbooks

[ehack]

Linux vendors need to understand that they are not selling the possibility that you can recompile and fix an issue, they are selling the fact that THEY have recompiled and fixed the issue for you.

Geeks are using a lot of Powerbooks because the hardware is supported seamlessly for sleep, DVD play etc: Apple has recompiled bsd for you :)

Re:Shouldn't it just work?

[Stephen VanDahm]

I agree that stuff should 'just work' out of the box. According to the LinuxCertified website [linuxcertified.com], this laptop costs $1399. I recently bought an Apple iBook with similar specs for about the same price. The Apple works correctly straight out of the box and OS X runs nearly all Linux programs for which the source is available. Besides that, it gives you the option of using commercial products like Quicken or Adobe Photoshop, if you need to use those for anything.

Since Apple's laptop prices are about the same as similarly-equipped x86 laptops and since OS X is a pretty complete UNIX workalike, it's pretty difficult to justify buying a Linux-only laptop at all, much less one that doesn't work 100%. If you're buying a laptop and want to go the UNIX-only route, an Apple laptop is the best choice in nearly every measurable respect. If, for some reason (and admittedly there are some), you require an x86 processor, you should just get a Dell or a Thinkpad with Windows preinstalled, repartition the disk, and install Linux or BSD yourself. At least that way, you can keep your Windows partition around for playing games and running commercial software applications like Photoshop.

Steve

Re:Laptop quality

[4lex]

You will notice (or at least I did) that getting an ibook working with linux is pretty easy. Reason? Unlikely with PCs, there are only so many ibook models, so it's very easy to find a HOWTO someone with your *exact* configuration kindly wrote. You can get, if you are lucky (like I was) even the .config for your shiny new 2.6.5 kernel :)

redhat review

[next1]

cooincidentally i was reading another review [linuxplanet.com] (from their site) of the same laptop recently, but this one is with redhat. interesting comparisson.

personally i am actually interested in these LC laptops because for me (in australia) they are so cheap. anyone with personal experience of shipping/delivery costs/times overseas, problems etc, would be appreciated.

Re:huh?

[next1]

fyi: review from another distro (redhat) [linuxplanet.com].

Apples to Oranges

[jole]

If you need to develop with Java using a modern IDE, an Apple laptop might not be what you are looking for. G4 is a lot slower running Eclipse than Pentium-M.

Anyway - I am currently typing an 800Mhz iBook G4 very happily and even run Eclipse on this one occasionally :)

Re:Power management

[10Ghz]

I'm not particularly in touch with this aspect of Linux, but I've heard that power management features haven't been all that great in Linux

From what I have heard, the Linux-implementation of APM/ACPI is pretty good. It follows the spec closely. The problem is that Microsofts implementation is not as good. It has bugs and other "weird things" in it.

Now, just about all laptops and the like are "designed for Windows XP" or some other crap like that. So they need to work with Windows and it's APM/ACPI-implementation. And that means it has to go around the bugs in the MS's implementation of it. While they do that, they deviate further away from the spec, and that means that implementations that follow the official spec more closely (like Linux) have problems with it.

Re:I am glad to see...

[emc]

It seems that the author has confused the word "robust" for "functional".

The whole Wifi experience is just not robust, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

This should read:
The whole Wifi experience is just not functional, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't