[Gloucs] A sucess story - linux on laptop working (almost) perfectly.

[Matthew Breeze]

Hi all,

I appeared at a couple of the meetings last year but have been away at uni 
so haven't been able to appear.  I just thought i would share my experince 
on getting linux to run on a laptop i recently bought.

After some research the laptop i bough was an IBM R50e (UR0BYUK).  I chose 
this one due to its price (around £430,) and its linux compatibility.  
Although there are no specific test reports for this model there are several 
on-line for the R50e, almost all stating that tested on Suse 9.1 everything 
but the networking worked, which wasnt tested in the tests i read.  So i 
went ahead and bough it.

The laptop comes with windows Xp home installed, and is partitioned with 2 
partitions, a 24GB windows partition, and a 4GB backup partition.  IBM have 
an interesting system of instead of having an install disk you have the 
default system on a hidden partition so you can recover at a touch of a 
button literally.  Can't say i have tried it yet.  As expected windows works 
out of the box for those who want it.  I had decided early on that i would 
need to have a dual boot laptop for uni, and that i would use Suse 9.3 
Professional because the other models had been tested on it (Suse9.1,) and 
out of personal preference.

Install:

The installation was reasonably simple, if a bit slow.  It took me a while 
to get the partitioning right, and the easiest way i found was to let Suse 
to create what it thinks was best, resize the windows / linux partition with 
the 'slider' and then finish with the detailed partitioning. In the end i 
finished with something like:
[] 4GB That IBM recovery thing – i thought i best to leave it there until i 
could back windows up properly.
[] 12GB Windows Partition.
[] 500MB Swap partition.
[] 6GB Linux root partition.
[] 5GB Linux Home partition
The hardrive size is a bit of a snug fit, but for what i use it for i dont 
need massive ammounts of space, and 5GB on the home drive will be pleanty.  
The install took a 3-4 hours , (i was doing a large install,) but as it was 
off the dvd it could be left to its own devices.  I had also plugged it into 
the local network by cable, and it seemed to have no problem downloading all 
the updates.

First Boot, What worked, and what didnt:

Linux started without a hitch, though it is worth paying attention to the 
grub setup to make sure that the rescue disk (that funny 4GB partition,) 
isnt set as default.  I'm not sure what it will do as i havnt tried it.  
Once into linux (gnome,) (i was still connected to the local network by the 
wire,) all the usual suspects worked, video, sound, mouse (red button 
thing,) along with the volume control buttons, and the network.  So the last 
thing to get working was the wireless conection...

After a few attempts i got it working.  At the moments in the drivers for 
the card seem a bit experiemental and dont appear to support adhoc 
networking, however if you are conecting to an access point it connected 
with no questions asked, (configured though yast.)  The other issue that i 
came across is that Suse can get confused if you have both the wired (eth0) 
and the wireless (eth1) connections active. I sorted this by setting eth0 to 
manual start, and i haven't had any problems since.

One thing i noted is that closing the top of the laptop while running linux 
doesnt send it totally to sleep, there are still a coupple of devices 
powered up so the battery will run out eventually.

And that's about where i am up to at the moment, apart from the small niggle 
with the inbuilt wireless, and the usual niggle about the lack of dvd 
support, (mostly me baing lasy, its better to compile mplayer anyhow,) The 
laptop works well and the battery lasts well if cdrom and hardrive acivity 
is limited (2-3 hours).  So if your looking for a linux friendly laptop at a 
reaonable price this one seems to do the job quite well.

Matt