Would you put Gentoo on a laptop?

f20cap1 · n00b Joined: 08 Mar 2004 Posts: 19 Location: Florida

I have been running Gentoo on my Compaq Evo N800w since I got it. (Work bought it for me, couldn't choose the brand) I have got to say though, I am very impressed with this laptop. Everything that I have wanted to use has worked. I never set up the winmodem, or the sleep/hibernate stuff though.

The only thing that I am having a problem with is three of my "extra" keys. X recognized them pre-2.6.x, but since then they have not worked. I suppose I could use setkeycodes to assign them values that X can work with, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

All said, I am very pleased with Gentoo and the only OS on this laptop.

Trevoke · Advocate Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Posts: 4099 Location: NY, NY

IBM Thinkpad..
Just don't run lm-sensors on it.
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monotux · Posted: Tue Nov 30, 2004 9:25 pm Post subject:

I've used gentoo on a 266 MHz laptop, and it ran fine, even with gnome (the machine had 256 MBytes of ram)

if you don't want to compile, try arch linux, another great distro

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pilla · Posted: Tue Nov 30, 2004 9:54 pm Post subject:

DoctorWack · Posted: Tue Nov 30, 2004 10:06 pm Post subject:

I would, and I did.
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raven7 · n00b Joined: 29 Aug 2004 Posts: 11

We've tried everything from the oldest to the newest betas of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Project, SuSe, Debian, Ubuntu etc. etc. And YES most distros [except for LFS and MS-DOS

] are easier to setup and get running than Gentoo but working in an environment with over 40k PCs we were instantly taken over by Gentoo's Portage system -- Portage allows us to focus more on our work and spend less time looking for dependencies.

Yes - we'd use Gentoo on our notebooks. In fact this is coming to you from an IBM T42/Pentium M 715 that's just been disgustingly slow in large file transfers on FC1 to FC3 (we tested FC just for the sake of doing it) and blew past everything else after converting to Gentoo and running ReiserFS. I played an 8-player LAN StarCraft Team DeathMatch (via Transgaming's Cedega) in a window while upgrading and configuring over 10 Cisco Catalyst 6513's over SSH/TFTP (each IOS upload file is around 40MB in size) with no slowdown at all.

Gentoo = Mo'Speed

dat · Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 4:12 pm Post subject:

I would and I did, though I wouldn't anymore.

I used to run gentoo on my ibm x31. Everything ran great as expected. However, I would hardly ever update the system because I couldn't stand the compile times. I couldn't leave the laptop running all the time (well, I could, but I didn't want to) to wait for these compiles to finish. So, instead, I moved over to ubuntu - since it's binary based - I think it suited my laptop much better.

Don't get me wrong, I still use gentoo and it's still my favorite distro. It has its place.... just not on my laptop.
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Insanity5902 · Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:17 pm Post subject:

dat - I have the same problem you do, so what I do is just emerge -vauD world a copule nigts a week, between that and keeping my system as much x86 instead of ~x86 as possible leaves me with very few programs to compile and by morning they are all done

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dat · Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:23 pm Post subject:

Insanity5902 · Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:30 pm Post subject:

i am not trying to convince you switch back, just giving a suggestion for those out there with the same problem

What you could also do is write a small bash script that will shutdown the laptop after the emerge process is finished, hell even a simple command line will do it

emerge -vauD world && shutdown -h now

now the system is on just long enough for the install. all you have to do is boot it up and update your configs.
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dat · Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:52 pm Post subject:

bang · Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:59 pm Post subject:

I got one of those $499 Celeron M 1.4GHz, 256MB ram, 40GB hdd, etc from BestBuy and installed Gentoo on it as soon as i got home

SilentGreg · Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2004 9:58 pm Post subject:

Nope, I wouldn't.

Reason 1: As I compile KDE or Gnokme or whatever, my desktop based Pentium 4 would begin to really heat up causing problems with my laptop.

Reason 2: My laptop gets very hot under heavy work, whether it be graphivs design or compiling, it annyoing and something that I have to correct.

Reason 3: My laptop hard drive has become louder and louder since the day I recieved this computer in the mail from Dell.

Now, I know I can buy a cooling pad and I know I can buy a new hard drive, I probably will as soon as I can afford it. For now, I think I am going to stick with a binary based distro and as soon as I can make those upgrades I'm moving to my all time favorite distro, Gentoo.

BTW, it's a Dell Inspiron 5100
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BlueDog · Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 6:13 am Post subject:

I've been using gentoo on my laptop for about a year now, and everything works great.

The only problem I've had, is that every couple of kernels, my system clock won't be set on shutdown, so when I reboot the time will be wrong. Then I'll change to a different kerenel version and suddenly the clock will stay set. Weird.

Diezel · Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 7:02 am Post subject:

I had Gentoo on my P4M 2.0 GHz. But I had to do an reinstall and the lappy is quite hot during a Gentoo install so I put Fedora on it.
Had it standing on 2 VCR tapes and the door open (Finland winter -5C) when I installed it.
So I keept it quite cool. The hardware did not work on any other distro until now, Fedora Core 3. Well it probaly would with some tinkering, but in Gentoo it worked like a charm.
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dreese9859 · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2004 Posts: 11

I got a Compaq Presario 2100 Series laptop and it installed just fine on mine. The networking on my laptop worked OK during installation but when I rebooted into the system it did not work, so I had to do a little tweaking with the append line on the bootloader to turn off a couple ACPI functions to get the network up. Otherwise, everything worked perfect!

Lepaca Kliffoth · Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2004 8:50 am Post subject:

Asus Athlon XP-m here, running gentoo without a problem. Ondemand governor takes care of the heat problem and compile times are cut by distcc. The only thing that's bothering me is the sloooow hard disk but it's got nothing to do with gentoo of course ^^
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MdaG · Posted: Tue Dec 14, 2004 4:25 pm Post subject:

I'm running Gentoo on my laptop and it's lightning!

http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_id=62824743641bf0ffceb632&p=screen

Hauser · Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 6:27 pm Post subject:

I'm thinking about buying either a Dell 700m or a Fujitsu S6210, which one do you guys think is better?
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nighty · Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 9:08 pm Post subject:

wilburpan · l33t Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 977

This is a "me too" sort of reply, but I have been running Gentoo on a 4 year old 700 MHz P3 laptop since Jan 2003, doing lots of compiling, and not having many problems. The only persistent hardware issues I have are:

1. my NIC card which is not fully supported by pcmcia-cs, and

2. a persistent "PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 4 of device 0000:00:07.1" message from dmesg.

I love using Gentoo on my laptop -- it's a heck of a lot better than Win 98, which is what this laptop came with.

Having said that, my next laptop is going to be an Apple Powerbook.

*ducks*
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paranode · l33t Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 679 Location: Texas

Gentoo is great on laptops. Wireless is what makes it the most fun, especially if you are up to ... nefarious.. things.

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blackhorse · Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2004 3:48 am Post subject:

My laptops overall speed is half that of the ones at school running winxp, yet it boots as fast and I have not messed around with things to make it go faster. Now that I am using fvwm it will probably start up after the login prompt faster.
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mr chilly · n00b Joined: 16 Dec 2004 Posts: 2

I havea beat up Compaq m700 with a pIII in it. Gentoo was a piece of cake to get going. I love it. As a matter of fact, it almost got me fired. I tossed gentoo on the p2 dell lattitude pos just to get a little more out of it. It took almost 9 hours just to emerge thunderbird. But, my boss likes it . Lucky for me gentoo rocks...or it'd be dial up hell from now on.

mcdermottpa · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 06 Oct 2004 Posts: 95

I have Gentoo installed on my Compaq V2000. I'm running on a 2.6.9 kernel and have software suspend working nicely (back to work in under 20 sec). I have not actually 'rebooted' it in quite some time. Wireless works great with ipw2200 (not fully mature). The 1.7 mhz pentium-m is much faster than expected as well.

A lot of people take issue with the long compile times as unduely heating thier laptops, and while I agree, with several computers on the network running distcc it hasn't been a show stopper for me.

The only thing that I can't seem to get working is the built in bluetooth. I think it's actually a usb device but just can't get it turned on or recognized.
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