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Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

(arstechnica.com)
520 points iProject | 5 comments | 29 Nov 12 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 14:53 UTC] No.4847958[source]▶
Every time I read this I have to think to my self how silly it is to lead an article with Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working

Thats total balony, trackpads and WiFi have been well supported in Linux for almost a decade. It is _rare_ to find a labtop that when you install la fresh modern distro on it , things don't work. Yes every now and then you get a vendor who insist on doing something different, but most of the time its a synaptic track pad ( well supported ) and a Broadcom or Intel WiFi card ( well supported ). I can remember back in 2004 taking my Government Issued Dell laptop and installing Fedora on it and everything working out of the box.

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1. epochwolf ◴[29 Nov 12 17:04 UTC] No.4848747[source]▶
Ubunutu on my new Thinkpad x131e can't change the brightness of the LCD and it runs the battery dry in two hours. Windows 8 can run for 7 hours with bthe brightness at 70%.

The track point sensitivity is too low and I have it at the highest sensitivity. (You need to turn the sensitivity in the settings to the lowest value to get the highest sensitivity!)

Don't get me started on lack of uefi boot support. Grub recognizes Windows 8 but refuses to boot it. I've had to install an msata ssd and put the Windows bootloader on that and install grub and a boot partition on the hdd to get useful dual booting.

Linux is far from a cakewalk on my machine.

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2. vegardx ◴[29 Nov 12 17:16 UTC] No.4848818[source]▶
You should take a look at ThinkWiki, they usually have good information on how to get around the little quirks of Linux on a Thinkpad.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

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3. epochwolf ◴[29 Nov 12 17:35 UTC] No.4848969[source]▶
I'll take another look. I didn't find a lot two weeks ago.

Update:

My device isn't listed on the wiki. I'll have to spend several more hours digging through various pages to find things to try. This is why I don't like linux for laptops. Windows 8 works out of the box. I'd rather just up the ram to 8gb and virtualize linux.

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4. cturner ◴[29 Nov 12 22:42 UTC] No.4850737{3}[source]▶
Have you been able to do that in a way so that power consumption doesn't get high? I try to run my laptop so the fan doesn't kick in in normal operation, and when I've tried linux under vmware I've found it gets hot fast.

I've got a thinkpad and have also had trouble getting the trackpad stuff configured the way I want it to work with extra utilities. That's the only problem I've had with it though. I wish the bios just had a way to switch off the trackpad, but leave the buttons above it functioning.

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5. epochwolf ◴[30 Nov 12 07:31 UTC] No.4852266{4}[source]▶
I haven't had time to do that yet. I mainly use the thinkpad for writing and watching videos when I'm away from home. Windows 8 runs evernote and VCL just fine. I go back to my Mac if I want to do development.