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DragonK
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 6:02 am    Post subject: To install or not to install Gentoo on a laptop Reply with quote

...that is the question.

(Hi everybody)

I'm wondering what do you think about installing Gentoo on a laptop? A couple of friends of mine are saying that it will lead
to a HDD failure after a while, due to the compilation process (because of the heating up).

I know for sure that their HDs failed, but I wonder how much the compilation process (and heat) has to do with this ?

Can you share some of your experiences? :roll:

PS: I can imagine that a poorly designed laptop which overheats would be predisposed to this kind of failure, but how about a "normal" laptop with no such problems? (anybody has a Dell Inspiron 6400? :) )

Thanks!
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Clete2
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 6:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a Dell Inspiron E1705 and was about to compile Gentoo (within the next week or so). You're scaring me. I'm going to be doing work on this laptop. I have the warranty for it, but I don't want to do without it for a few weeks.
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di1bert
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 6:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've been running Gentoo on two laptops (my last one was stolen, yay South Africa) and I wouldn't run anything else. While I get where people are coming from with the overheating, I've yet to experience any bad side effects from running Gentoo on a laptop.

To cut a long story short, go for it :D

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Roman_Gruber
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 6:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi, i have gentoo since a year now on my TARGA notebook. The hardware is crappy, but I had no errors in the meantime.

What I wonder: I had problems with the delivered hdd from Western Digital, so i exchanged it in february with a hdd from samsung. Suddently I had no errors any more. Now I have 96^C while playing at my turion cpu and 46^C at my hdd while playing. I bought samsung of the 5 years guarantee and the harddisk is much bigger than the western. I thing western is a crappy hardware, I had only problems with these harddrives.

I have to say, that I have optimized the system, so it get 80*C while compiling and it switches of when I play games, when the cpu is running at 100% which means 1800mhz; 88% at 1600 mhz it also switches of. The laptop has a design failure, I will complain warranty as this supermarket notebook from lidl is shit.
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DragonK
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 6:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

di1bert wrote:
I've been running Gentoo on two laptops (my last one was stolen, yay South Africa) and I wouldn't run anything else. While I get where people are coming from with the overheating, I've yet to experience any bad side effects from running Gentoo on a laptop.


I wouldn't run anything else either, that's my problem: I want linux and I want gentoo :)

@Clete2: don't be scared! (yet :twisted: ); my question is based on the feedback of two friends of mine. That's why i've asked here, to make an opinion on this "issue".


@tw04l124: 80*C on the HDD ? or the CPU?
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kernelcowboy
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 7:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have had Gentoo on an old pII Company Armada laptop.
Gentoo works fine on it. I did have a harddrive failure at one
point, but installed a new one, and haven't had problems
since. I think, though can't be sure, that the HD was just plain
old. I don't know if Gentoo made it's life any shorter than normal.

I had a similar question in 2004, but not laptop specific

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-1005709-highlight-.html#1005709

Finally, I had a IBM T23 that just failed. I think the motherbood is fried. The HD is
fine, I pulled it out, and use it in another machine. Don't think Gentoo was the
cause again.
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Monkeh
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 8:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

DragonK wrote:
I'm wondering what do you think about installing Gentoo on a laptop? A couple of friends of mine are saying that it will lead
to a HDD failure after a while, due to the compilation process (because of the heating up).


The temperature of the HDD shouldn't get high enough to cause failures. In the case of SATA HDDs however, the current libata drivers don't properly stop them on shutdown, which can cause damage.


tw04l124 wrote:
Hi, i have gentoo since a year now on my TARGA notebook. The hardware is crappy, but I had no errors in the meantime.


My Targa is fine. :P

Quote:
What I wonder: I had problems with the delivered hdd from Western Digital, so i exchanged it in february with a hdd from samsung. Suddently I had no errors any more. Now I have 96^C while playing at my turion cpu and 46^C at my hdd while playing. I bought samsung of the 5 years guarantee and the harddisk is much bigger than the western. I thing western is a crappy hardware, I had only problems with these harddrives.


Western Digital HDDs are excellent. You got a bad one.

Quote:
The laptop has a design failure, I will complain warranty as this supermarket notebook from lidl is shit.


Erm, it's far more likely that it's a faulty laptop. I had the same issues with my old Acer, it was a bad heatsink. My current laptop (Targa 1574 X2) is just fine (it's an MSI rebrand).
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mudrii
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 8:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I had Sony Laptop P3 some years ago and run gentoo all time along.
I had a problem with my home router so I put the laptop with additional PCMCI card on Net as a router firewall that run 3 months in Japanese summer non-stop.
In the end laptop was gone because of the keyboard and some display problems not the hdd.
It was a study release by google some month ago about hdd problems in Datacenter and heat is not a big problem for hdd study findings.
So go for it laptop should work grate with gento
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user118696
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 10:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Monkeh wrote:
In the case of SATA HDDs however, the current libata drivers don't properly stop them on shutdown, which can cause damage.


Really? Is this true for all SATA HDDs or only laptop ones? It's surely a known issue i.e. work in progress?
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Monkeh
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 10:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

pascal.bolduc wrote:
Monkeh wrote:
In the case of SATA HDDs however, the current libata drivers don't properly stop them on shutdown, which can cause damage.


Really? Is this true for all SATA HDDs or only laptop ones? It's surely a known issue i.e. work in progress?


As far as I know, it only affects laptops, but I could be wrong. And yes, it's a known issue, and it's already fixed. However it won't be in the mainline kernel for a while.. gentoo-sources-2.6.21-r2 has the patch however.
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DragonK
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 10:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

So, to sum it up, they are able to handle hours of continuous compiling without a negative efect on the hardware (or without accelerating hardware "degradation", more than normal usage...). Right? :)
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Monkeh
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 11:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

DragonK wrote:
So, to sum it up, they are able to handle hours of continuous compiling without a negative efect on the hardware (or without accelerating hardware "degradation", more than normal usage...). Right? :)


Except for it becoming hot enough to be uncomfortable to type on, my laptop has no problems compiling (for itself or other machines via distcc) for an entire day.
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 12:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

As long as DMA is enabled on your HDD, there's no reason for your Hard drive to die from compilation. I've been using a Fujitsu laptop running gentoo for two years and have not had any issues with my Hard Drive.
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vandien
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 1:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a Dell latitude C400 that gets quite hot when compiling. I use cpufreq to force the cpu to run at 800MHz instead of 1.2GHz, which helps considerably. 60C instead of 80+. Honestly I worry much more about the CPU failing than the hard drive :)

Also, you can build binary packages on another machine (if you have one).
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cwr
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 1:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've run Gentoo on a ThinkPad T23 for the last two or three years, and it
doesn't seem to have done it any harm. There's a fair amount of Linux
code for monitoring Thinkpad hardware (I don't know if that's true for other
laptops) and the thermal systems always seem keep the temperature under
control. Temperature is something to watch, if you can, but it shouldn't be
a problem on machines of even reasonable quality.

Probably the main difficulty would be memory - I wouldn't like to build Gentoo
with less than 512Mb, but I suppose you could do most of the compiling on
a desktop machine and just install the binaries. Portage makes that fairly
easy, and I've done it the other way around with a very old and slow desktop
machine with 64Mb. (Obviously, that didn't run X).

The T23 is around 1GHz and 512Mb, and that's more than good enough for
building and running Gentoo. I like Gentoo on the T23 because I can configure
it pretty exactly to the hardware, so the result is quick and reliable.

But for pity's sake don't use the GUI installer - the last time I tried it, it tried to
wipe the partition table. Use a Stage 3 install; the LiveDVD contains almost
everything you need.

Hope this helps - Will
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 2:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I had gentoo on my T23 from 2002 to this year without any problems. Now it's running ubuntu because it's with my father. Good hardware lives longer.
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 5:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Never had a problem with my Acer TM803, compiles Gentoo just happily and fairly quick, considering its age (> 3.5 years).

Overheating notebooks are crap in the first place, and Gentoo wouldn't be the only problem - I've seen cheap consumer-notebooks breaking down at playing Civilization3/4 etc...
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 5:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I use gentoo regularly on my laptops (IBM T23 and Dell 620 widescreen) via VMWare running fullscreen. I havent taken the leap yet to ditch microsloth on those machines. I did the build portion and created the VM on a workstation (where in the desktop/server world I have 11 machines running gentoo native). Besides - its alot more fun watching a dualcore rip thru building than watching the p3 in the T23 :D
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PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2007 5:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Go for it! I've noticed gentoo makes my hard drives much quieter as the finished system is much more efficient. Hard drives seem to thrive on constant seeks.

The only way I've been able to destroy a laptop hard drive is insufficient current from a USB hard drive adapter. The expected dropping, kicking, swapping, and even backflipping onto a hardwood floor from the recliner several times never destroyed one of mine.
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PostPosted: Wed May 30, 2007 12:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Madtux performance laptop (rebranded ASUS) works perfect here. It never gets too hot to type on, even when playing games AND compiling at the same time.
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 11:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I used to have some problems installing gentoo on my HP laptop. The acpi doesn't recognize my fan and the cpu temp goes straight up while compiling (stage3 install via a liveCD). I tried several times and I found the answer in the end. ACPI must be turned on explicitly in the boot parameter. I wonder what happens to acpi if neither acpi=on nor acpi=off is passed to the kernel.

Now I just started installing Gentoo from yesterday and have almost finished configuring all the stuff by now. It is a great experience installing (reading books while emerging gnome). Just give it a try!
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 8:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you are worried about heat from the cpu during emerges you can try forcing the cpu to a slower frequency usually lowers the total heat output too. cpufreq should be able to do this for you if you set the max frequency to be lower than 100%
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 17, 2007 4:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Another data point: I've run gentoo on my last two laptops, a thinkpad t22 and a newer t43. I've never had any trouble at all with hard drives overheating or any other kind of damage due to intense hard drive usage.
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jerann
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 6:05 am    Post subject: A few other things to think about Reply with quote

My laptop experiences serious overheating issues when the CPU goes to full usage for a while. To get around this, of course I scaled the CPU frequency down, but I also use the instructions here to run emerges from my desktop. If you're concerned about wearing out your laptop, that is a great way to get around it. As far as the hard drive goes, in my experience laptop hard drives aren't as reliable as desktop drives anyway. My laptop's hard drive crapped out on me when it was about two years old, and it was only running Windows at the time. On the other hand, I've been using the hard drive I replaced that one with much more heavily since then and haven't had any problems with it. I guess all I'm saying is that you really should be prepared for a hard drive to go regardless of your OS and backup important data, but I really doubt emerging will make any difference unless you're having heat issues. Gentoo can be (when properly configured) very responsive, and so is probably the best distro you can put on a laptop (though I'm somewhat biased :D ).
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 27, 2007 9:06 pm    Post subject: Gentoo linux on a laptop? Reply with quote

Hi friend, do anyone have any experience of using Gentoo linux on a laptop? Right now i am Looking to put Gentoo linux on my Compaq Armada M700, wondering if anyone out there has some experience with this. I will be very happy to know your both good/bad experience with Gentoo.
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