- Connect USB hardware (keyboard, mouse, camera)
- Display to multiple screens (internal flatscreen and desktop flatscreen at a different resolution) simultaneously)
- Connect to wireless networks, using a card which is not supported by linux, by loading the Windows NT driver for my card
- Connect to wired networks.
- Watch movies.
- Play OpenGL games with good hardware accelleration. (e.g., Neverwinter Nights)
- Play music.
- Use voice-over-IP, courtesy of Divmod and Shtoom
- Get accurate reports of remaining battery life.
- Conserve battery power when I'm not using the processor's full capacity.
Last time I had a laptop, getting these things working would have been a 6-month project, minimum. This time things are working in less than a week, even given a really stupid mistake that hosed my installation completely and forced me to re-do all the configuration work. It really blows my mind. The only thing that I really haven't gotten working that I have in Windows so far is software suspend, or "hibernate", and I know exactly what I need to do (but haven't yet because of the annoyance of a kernel compile).
I hope that works when I try it next, because if it works that will mean I have a portable, dual-boot, dual-display machine that can swap from Windows to Linux in a matter of seconds.
Linux still has a little ways to go in the "automatically detecting your hardware" department, but at least things work more or less the way they say they should these days, if you spend a moment with the appropriate documentation. I'm really pleased.
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6 comments:
I'm amazingly happy to hear that. This is exactly the kind of progress that makes me happy -- Linux becomes more and more feasible as one's everyday operating system. Which distribution did you use? Which version? What software are you using to view movies?
Thanks.
Debian.
Installed unstable from the latest d-i sarge netinst ISO.
xine. (package xine-ui)
That is all :).
Ah well. Looks like hibernate breaks completely if I'm using X, or I'm using a USB device, or I look at the computer funny and generate any kind of interrupt during the resume process.
I guess I'll try that part again in a few months.
Hmm, there's swsusp and also usually a hardware-specific ACPI/APM mechanism. Which are you using? I thought swsusp was pretty stable by now.
swsusp2, to be precise. swsusp1 just crashed instantly when I tried it.
Okay! swsusp works in 2.6.9-rc1. I don't know if I just changed what I was doing or what - but pmdisk (echo disk > /sys/power/state) is completely broken, whereas swsusp (echo 4 > /proc/acpi/sleep) works perfectly, even with X and ndiswrapper loaded. I'll post about this at the top level again soon.
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