# Thin and light laptop for Gentoo

## skizrule

I'm going off to college next year and I'd like to purchase a laptop, preferably one which runs Gentoo well. I can get a Inspiron 600m or Latitude D600 with a Pentium M processor with a school discount, but I'm not terribly sure of the Linux support for the Centrino chipset. Are either of these computers a good choice? I'm also open to any AMD processors, but I haven't found many in the thin-and-light category. I'm looking for a laptop under 1.5" thick and under 8 pounds, with 3+ hour battery life and a decent graphics card. I'd like to keep it under $1600USD if possible (less is of course better), and the more the hardware is supported under Gentoo, the better. Any suggestions?

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## Odin

I'm using an Averatec 3150p, just about everything works, although I haven't tried the modem I'm told its possible. The only thing I haven't really played with is suspend (to disk or ram) but I've heard some success with getting swsusp working.. I haven't tried because I figure thats not really much different from just shutting down.

Specs-

Athlon XP-M LV 1600+ - freq scaling works fine

USB Prism 2.5/3 802.11b - works with linux-wlan-ng

VIA KM266 chipset - everything works fine

S3 ProSavageDDR - I don't have 3d accel working but apparently its possible, but a lot of work.

12" 1024x768 screen

CD-RW/DVD-ROM - Haven't actually tried burning a cd or playing a dvd in linux but I don't see any reason it wouldn't work.

1.2" thick and 4.3 lbs.

Only problem is that the battery life is a little short - I usually get about 2:30 in linux with the CPU scaled down (400mhz) and display dimmed. Its cheap enough that a second battery is probably in your budget though. The graphics card may turn you off as well. A new model just came out recently (3200 series), but I'd stay away from it for a while, because it appears its got some picky hardware - VIA UniChrome graphics and an 802.11g chipset that probably would work with ndiswrapper or linuxant but has no native drivers.

Summary - all the hardware works, very small and light, but the graphics and battery life may not be what you like, also the keyboard layout bothers some people, but I got used to it in a couple days.

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## Rainmaker

 *skizrule wrote:*   

> I'm going off to college next year and I'd like to purchase a laptop, preferably one which runs Gentoo well. I can get a Inspiron 600m or Latitude D600 with a Pentium M processor with a school discount, but I'm not terribly sure of the Linux support for the Centrino chipset. Are either of these computers a good choice? I'm also open to any AMD processors, but I haven't found many in the thin-and-light category. I'm looking for a laptop under 1.5" thick and under 8 pounds, with 3+ hour battery life and a decent graphics card. I'd like to keep it under $1600USD if possible (less is of course better), and the more the hardware is supported under Gentoo, the better. Any suggestions?

 

Linux is pretty good in hardware these days. You can get almost everything to work, although simetimes it requires a bit of hacking.

Centrino is not fully supported, take a look at http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/ for the driver and https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=147295 for tips and tricks

@Odin:

Try activating "laptop mode". That should give you a better battery life. see /usr/src/linux/Documentation/laptop-mode.txt

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## Odin

I'll give that a try.

I don't get much better in windows, though, so I'm not too optimistic  :Smile: 

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## fullsteam

 *Rainmaker wrote:*   

>  *skizrule wrote:*   I'm going off to college next year and I'd like to purchase a laptop, preferably one which runs Gentoo well. I can get a Inspiron 600m or Latitude D600 with a Pentium M processor with a school discount, but I'm not terribly sure of the Linux support for the Centrino chipset. Are either of these computers a good choice? I'm also open to any AMD processors, but I haven't found many in the thin-and-light category. I'm looking for a laptop under 1.5" thick and under 8 pounds, with 3+ hour battery life and a decent graphics card. I'd like to keep it under $1600USD if possible (less is of course better), and the more the hardware is supported under Gentoo, the better. Any suggestions? 
> 
> Linux is pretty good in hardware these days. You can get almost everything to work, although simetimes it requires a bit of hacking.
> 
> Centrino is not fully supported, take a look at http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/ for the driver and https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=147295 for tips and tricks
> ...

 

Re wireless driver. That's what I though when I bought my current Centrino Laptop - an Asus/Astone M6N.  But later discovered that newer Centrinos are coming with the 2200 wireless chipset which isn't supported by that driver.  Only choice is one of the wrapper drivers (eg NDISWrapper which causes my Kernel to hang).  On the upside once there is support for it you get to use 802.11g with the 2200.

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## val

I know this is an old thread and you may have your laptop already by now but here's my take anyway.  I have the Dell 600m running gentoo and so far I am very happy with it.  There are lots of people on the forums with the exact same laptop so there's lots of support.  I was able to get wireless working with ndiswrapper with little trouble.  I also have bluetooth working.  I have many acpi things working.  The only thing I'd really like to work but don't have working is hibernating and sleep states.  Hibernating may be possible, I just haven't hacked at it enough yet.  Though I don't think that's hardware specific, more of a kernel specific problem. 

Well, good luck and tell us what you end up getting.  :Smile: 

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## pjv

Acer TravelMate 803LCiB is absolutely fantastic. There's a huge support thread for this laptop right here on Gentoo. And we are only waiting for one more component to get the laptop fully working! The 2.6 kernel version of the kernel driver for the smartcardreader should arrive soon, so...  :Wink: 

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## hw-tph

Apple's iBooks are very affordable and quite nice. The 12" PowerBook is also very small and light but it's not really affordable...hell, it's darn expensive.

I just ordered a HP NX9105 which is by no means a small and light laptop but quite the opposite, weighing in at almost 7 pounds. It does however feature a lot of nice stuff like a 32bit Clawhammer CPU (!!), Nforce3 chipset, Firewire, DVD/CDRW, 5-in-1 digital media reader and a widescreen LCD. And it is *very* affordable - for me it cost less than half of the Intel-based equivalents or AMD-based equivalents from other manufacturers.

Håkan

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## theoakwise

 *Odin wrote:*   

> A new model just came out recently (3200 series), but I'd stay away from it for a while, because it appears its got some picky hardware - VIA UniChrome graphics and an 802.11g chipset that probably would work with ndiswrapper or linuxant but has no native drivers.

 

I just finished getting gentoo up and running on an Averatec 3200H.  Very happy; ndiswrapper found the wireless card no problem.  Only two sticking points are the VIA graphics & USB:

The usb ports don't seem to work right with USB 2.0 (aka EHCI) turned on in the kernel, and I have to use the "vesa" drivers for X.  Battery life is 2-3 hours usually, but it's small and light, and I'm really impressed with the speed.

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## racoontje

Centrino (or very similar) work very nice in my experience.

IBM offers to ship TP's with their own (non-Centrino) wireless cards, which are great! They are supported by the atheros driver.

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## kimchi_sg

I'm also having the same question as the topic creator. I'm thinking of buying either Acer TM 292XCi or Fujitsu Lifebook C1212. They're not exactly the lightest that my school offers, but they are the cheapest ones at about US$1400. If anyone is interested in the notebooks' specs, it's here.

Can anyone tell me what problems I will have installing Gentoo on either one, if any? How complete is Gentoo's support for the hardware?

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## val

Both of those laptops have the same wireless card and processor as mine....

Since my last post, there has been a native linux driver for the wireless card.  It works great.  I can now scan for networks, and connect to encrypted networks.

I also have hibernating working now.

I almost never use bluetooth.  I had a bluetooth mouse but it sucked up too many batteries.  I just use a corded mouse now.

The only problem is the suckey support for ATI graphics, but you'll have that problem with most laptops.  It only means I can't have accellerated 3D rendering or drop shadows with xorg.  It's not a huge deal to me.

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