# Best kernel for laptop

## mclion

Hi

In the portage tree there are so many kernels and I don't know what to choose for my laptop... It is a Compaq presario 100% ACPI laptop with VIA chipset, a S3 savage/twister graphics card (so I think no framebuffer support for it?) and an AMD Duron Powernow processor... The most important thing is the ACPI and options to change the freq for this CPU...

What kernel do you use or what would you recomend for this type of hardware?

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## asubedi

I have 2.4.20-gentoo-r5 and my system is very stable. I think ck or gaming would be good for you if you play a lot of games.

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## pilla

AFAIK, gentoo-sources nor gaming-sources don't have CPU frequency stepping patches. On the other hand, try wolk-sources

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## hulk2nd

i would say the ac-sources are absolutely the best ones for laptop

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## dbasinge

 *hulk2nd wrote:*   

> i would say the ac-sources are absolutely the best ones for laptop

 

Just curious, what is in the ac-sources that make it better for laptops?

Mike

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## mclion

I've tried wolk and ac sources and at the moment (2.4.22-pre2) the best kernel sources for that laptop are really the alan cox's ones.. They even have DRI support for the S3 Savage card that the wolk don't have... but the wolk got some nice improvements for the desktop that I had to turn off because it crashed the kernel at boot (at least on this machine)

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## hulk2nd

for example in the ac kernel source you can find the latest acpi patches, the actual cpu frequence scaling drivers ( 4 example penium m enhanced speedstep) or the latest chipset support. the new intel centrino chipset is also supported so that agpart will work.

3 important points for (centrino-)laptops.

i think there are some other things, i don't remember.

greets,

hulk

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## wilburpan

I've been using development-sources and/or mm-sources since about 2.5.6x without any major problems.  Currently I'm using the latest unpatched development-sources.

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## hulk2nd

i tried them once, but i got kernel panic after some settings i dont remember and i didnt get pcmcia working ( pcmcia-cs doesnt work with that kernel anymore) and i didnt get bootsplash working cause the bootsplash patches doesnt work with that kernel either. 

greets,

hulk

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## dang

I use mm-sources (2.6.0-test3-mm1 currently), and they're great.  Good ACPI, good device support, fast, stable, crypto-api (encrypted swap.  Yum.)   I used to use ck-sources, because of the good acpi and speed, but mm-sources is better.

There are a few issues if you're using LVM and upgrading (which I've done) but other than that, no problems.

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## smiler.se

I must say that mm-sources are the best sources Ive tried on my laptop (and workstation).

Sure they lack bootsplash and some other fancy things but I dont find those very important.

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## krazo

I find Dis's kernel the best for laptops. He adds in Preempt, O(1), cpufreq, latest ACPI, swsusp (latest version), laptop-mode patch and a lot of other sweet patches.

You can find it here: http://www.gotontheinter.net/exoops/modules/news/

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## hulk2nd

looks nice, lets give him a try! did you managed to get software suspend working?

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## krazo

 *hulk2nd wrote:*   

> looks nice, lets give him a try! did you managed to get software suspend working?

 

Ya, it works very well.

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## m.c.p

Hi mclion,

 *mclion wrote:*   

> I've tried wolk and ac sources and at the moment (2.4.22-pre2) the best kernel sources for that laptop are really the alan cox's ones.. They even have DRI support for the S3 Savage card that the wolk don't have... but the wolk got some nice improvements for the desktop that I had to turn off because it crashed the kernel at boot (at least on this machine)

 

Well, if something does not work for you, why you don't tell me?

WOLK has a bug tracking system, feature request forum and many more. Software can only survive if there are bug reports ;pp

Adding S3 Savage DRI support is more than trivial. I'll add it to WOLK5.0 (I'll start hacking 5.0s once 2.4.22 final is out)

ciao, Marc

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## m.c.p

Hi hulk2nd

 *hulk2nd wrote:*   

> for example in the ac kernel source you can find the latest acpi patches, the actual cpu frequence scaling drivers ( 4 example penium m enhanced speedstep) or the latest chipset support. the new intel centrino chipset is also supported so that agpart will work.
> 
> 3 important points for (centrino-)laptops.
> 
> hulk

 

Well, it's also quite easy to merge this into WOLK. But I depend on users who are sending new stuff to me.

Anyway, WOLK5 will be based on .22 final once it's out so all the bleedinge edge stuff isn't that hard to merge.

ciao, Marc

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## pilla

 *m.c.p wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Well, if something does not work for you, why you don't tell me?
> 
> 

 

Great! A wolk-source developer!  :Smile: 

As soon as 5.0 is out, I'll test it with my Thinkpad T23. Until 4.6, they are the most stable for me and have all the features I want. 

2.4.22pre AC's release had problems with ltmodem, something in serial-2.4.c. Let's see if it is the case in wolk 5.0

Keep on the good work.

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## dan2003

Every kernel ive tried with software suspend so far has suspended, but paniced striegt away after resme. it will get back to where i was and then go aiii, interupts nt synching and lock solid.. not even magic-sys works

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## m.c.p

Hi Bloody Bastard  :Smile: 

 *Bloody Bastard wrote:*   

> Great! A wolk-source developer! 

 s/a/the/ ... yeah  :Smile: 

 *Bloody Bastard wrote:*   

>  As soon as 5.0 is out, I'll test it with my Thinkpad T23. Until 4.6, they are the most stable for me and have all the features I want. 

  Does this mean, anything after 4.6s does not work for you?

 *Bloody Bastard wrote:*   

> Keep on the good work.

 Thank you. I'll do  :Smile: 

P.S.: The new-IDE addon for 4.8s is a backport from 2.4.22-ac/2.4.22/2.4.21 IDE code including SATA support + various fixes. At least Centrino IDE support is now in  :Smile: 

ciao, Marc

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## pilla

 *m.c.p wrote:*   

> Hi Bloody Bastard 
> 
>  *Bloody Bastard wrote:*   Great! A wolk-source developer!  s/a/the/ ... yeah 
> 
> 

 

OK  :Smile: 

 *m.c.p. wrote:*   

> 
> 
>  *Bloody Bastard wrote:*    As soon as 5.0 is out, I'll test it with my Thinkpad T23. Until 4.6, they are the most stable for me and have all the features I want.   Does this mean, anything after 4.6s does not work for you?
> 
> 

 

No, haven't tried any releases after 4.6s. I had to download it by myself, because there was no ebuild for it in portage. Maybe you could take on the ebuilds, too, then they would have the lastest release at anytime  :Smile: 

I used to have some glitches with compiling alsa-drivers, that are solved in 0.9.6

Cheers

BB

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## dan2003

Im not having much luck here! the wolk sources kernel frezzes me laptop solid after setting system clock [UTC].

I have tried disbaling all the preemt and desktp tweaking stuff but still no luck.. wll  investagte further when i get some time

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## puddpunk

 *m.c.p wrote:*   

> Hi mclion,
> 
>  *mclion wrote:*   I've tried wolk and ac sources and at the moment (2.4.22-pre2) the best kernel sources for that laptop are really the alan cox's ones.. They even have DRI support for the S3 Savage card that the wolk don't have... but the wolk got some nice improvements for the desktop that I had to turn off because it crashed the kernel at boot (at least on this machine) 
> 
> Well, if something does not work for you, why you don't tell me?
> ...

 

<Southpark>

Oh my God! It's Marc-Christian Peterson!

</Southpark>

I always love it when celebrities join in (in the forums, and on southpark! "Oh my god! It's rockband Korn!").

Anyway, back on topic... I have a Compaq Presario laptop, AMD k62, 56Mb RAM, 5 gb hdd and windows just isnt cutting it.

It's running knoppix at the moment with a persistant home dir, but I'm looking to install gentoo on it. Perhaps a laptop-sources could be an idea, kind of a desktop(pre-empt etc...)/acpi/special laptop drivers hybrid could be created?

Just a thought...

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## mclion

 *m.p.c wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Well, if something does not work for you, why you don't tell me?
> 
> WOLK has a bug tracking system, feature request forum and many more. Software can only survive if there are bug reports ;pp
> ...

 

Till this thread I thought (I never looked) that in the portage there is the last wolk source.. Now I see it lags .5 versions and about 2 megs of compressed patches. I've created my own wolk ebuild and now I'm installing it on my disk.. After I finish compiling it, I'd report to you if something fails. Hope not. 

The only bug that I've encontered and didn't find a way to solve (with disabling some options) was the APIC + ACPI bug. It the two are turned conteporary on, the machine crashes at boot. With any patched kernel and with the 2.5 tree... Maybe I just didn't get enought deep into the documentation I suppose.

For the DRI support. It would be nice, X-Free runs just more naturally with it in the kernel. I've never noticed it before (because there was no support I suppose)  :Smile: ... Now I'm using Wolk 4.0s because of the preemptive kernel (it's a pain working without it in XFree anyway).

One question... On SF there is talking about Wolk S and W subversions and there is only the S(erver) version. Would there be ever the planned workstation version? A laptop will never be a server machine I suppose.  :Smile: 

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## hulk2nd

i'm terribly sorry, but ive never heard something about these wolk sources nor did i knew the exist

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## tam

I have a Thinkpad T23 with S3 Savage and ac-sources. S3 is in my kernel, also dri and glx are loaded by xfree, but I have a problem emerging xfree-drm.

What VIDEO_CARDS do I have to use?

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## michael-reilly

I tried the wolk kernel on my A31p.  It hung on boot right after printing the 

```
Freeing unused kernel memory: 136k freed

```

message.  No disk activity.  No response to anything except to echo the <CR> key if I press it.

I am still trying the other kernels and will look into some of the ones listed in this thread.  Thank you to those who recommend the various kernels.

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## Gnufsh

I used to use ac-sources, but I've switched to mm-sources. For a while I used gentoo or ck -sources with the cpufreq patch applied by hand, but I got bored fast patching several files by hand to get it to work every time. My Laptop is a HP ZE1250, with a AXP 1800+ and savage graphics (Twister K, but uses the savage driver, as that's what it is). I didn't know about savage DRI support in ac-sources. Is it in the section of mneuconfig with all the other DRI drivers?

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