Re: It's a simple question....
On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:49:48 -0800
Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.ca> wrote:
> Justin Hartman wrote:
>
> > So down to the "simple" question. Is this really normal on a PC-based
> > Laptop to experience such pitfalls in installing Debian?
>
> With the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads, not usually. With Dell, HP, Acer, etc, yes,
> the experience is typical. This is a result of most laptop vendors not
> documenting their hardware properly, or inability or unwillingness to share
> the documentation with the people who bought the product or Linux
> developers. Voting with your money is important when it comes to
> compatability on Linux.
I recently installed Sid on an Acer Aspire AS3690 (lowest end of the
Aspire line), and I was actually impressed with how smoothly the whole
thing went. Only one real problem (buggy hardware / software involving
the rtc - this is aparently a common problem [0]). I don't have
suspend / hibernate working properly yet, but I haven't tryed very
hard. Even the wireless [Broadcom BCM4318 AirForce One] worked almost
out of the box, one just needs non-free firmware, which can be
installed automatically with the 'bcm43-fwcutter' package.
Incidentally, the 60GB HDD came with 3 partitions: ~27GB with Windows
(several GB occupied by the OS, the remainder empty (virtually *no*
silly trial apps or other worthless stuff - wow!), ~27GB empty, and ~5
for some sort of system restore. I just left the windows and restore
partitions alone and deleted the empty one, replacing it with a half
dozen more for linux. Very convenient.
Celejar
[0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=277298 and
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/43661
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