OTA and Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org>

| D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

| >   But getting a mainstream notebook
| > running 100% under Linux is a real crap shoot.
| > 
| Not really. It's just a matter of getting a laptop without oddball hardware
| and choosing a distro that's designed to work well with laptops.

Most notebooks have oddball hardware:

- video chips that are not (yet?) supported by X.org.  Note that the
  "yet" doesn't help -- not supported NOW is the key issue.

  + old notebooks are often well supported, but who wants to buy an
    old notebook?

  + Intel chipsets are often well supported.  But the screen
    resolutions are in the BIOS ROM and often don't include the
    native resolution for the LCD!  There is a hack to solve this, but
    the hack is not standard issue in any distro that I know of:
	http://www.geocities.com/stomljen/

- 802.11g wireless radios are usually not supported by Linux these
  days

  + broadcom's chipset has finally been reverse engineered and I have
    the impression that the driver may be getting past beta.  Some
    functions are still missing, I think.

  + ndiswrapper is a hack that may work, but often it blows the kernel
    stacks (Linux is supposed to provide 4k for stacks (many distros
    choose to provide 8k to allow for sloppy drivers) but WinXP
    provides 64k so there is no guarantee that that an ndiswrapped
    driver will work).  ndiswrapper cannot provide all functions that
    a native driver would since the WinXP driver API isn't rich
    enough.

  + Intel and Atheros (I think) have open source drivers but require a
    binary slug of firmware that pure distro's won't include.

- ACPI (for suspend, for example) is really shaky in my experience.
  And the failures are hard to localize.  Apparently the AGP GART code
  is part of the problem.  Each device driver needs to do the right
  things.  So Linux is not blameless.

  The vendors' BIOS usually has ACPI that "works for WinXP" and may
  have serious bugs that they don't care to address.

  I talked to Bdale Garbee (HP Linux CTO) about this.  The laptop
  folks make some effort to have their "business" notebooks work with
  Linux, but none at all for the consumer models.  And once a model is
  superseded, no fixes are likely forthcoming.

  ACPI has replaced APM (which Linux did work well with, eventually)

- My notebook has a peculiar built-in flash memory reader.  It needs a
  slug of firmware loaded to make it act as a flash memory reader.
  There is a Linux driver that will load firmware.  But the firmware
  is only available, encrypted, in the WinXP driver.  TI has not
  chosen to release the unencrypted version, let alone the source.
  The author of the Linux driver knows how to decrypt it but appears
  to be scared of the DMCA or French law.

| This is an area where I believe Mandriva shines.

Ubuntu has apparently made a standing offer to manufacturers: send us
a few laptops and we'll work on supporting them.  Not much that they
can do about components with no released specs.

| It can autodetect what kind
| of laptop, so if there's some hw-specific stuff that it can install, it will
| try. My install on Thinkpad T42 automatically installed support for the extra
| keys and hot-plugging the docking station.

T42 is
(1) originally IBM, a fairly Linux-friendly company,
(2) been around for a while, and
(3) business class (quite expensive).
So it is not mainstream in the sense I meant it -- not Future Shop /
Best Buy, not getting cheap as dirt.  I personally drool over the T42p
(or maybe I mean T43p) but am unwilling to pay for it.

You might infer from this post that I have a certain amount of scar tissue.

| Commercial support is available for laptops purchased from Emperorlinux.com,
| and they have a pretty good selection. Good resources for DIY laptop
| installers can be found at http://tuxmobil.org/ and
| http://www.linux-laptop.net/

Sure, but these certainly are not mainstream.
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