Choosing Ubuntu Fully Compatible Laptop Is Easier Now | Hacker News Reader

Choosing Ubuntu Fully Compatible Laptop Is Easier Now

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120 pointstzury90 comments

tl;dr: don't believe it, at least not for any recent Intel ThinkPads.

I have the ThinkPad T420 with Sandy Bridge graphics that they list as "Certified" under 11.04. This is at best highly misleading. I bought this laptop under the delusion that choosing components that were supported by open source in-tree drivers written by the actual hardware vendor was the right decision to make. Alas, Natty out of the box hangs quite frequently, and X is very unstable. The DisplayPort output is unusable, and even non-DisplayPort output via an adapter didn't quite work.

After quite a lot of fiddling, I've found that the latest upstream kernels (I'm using 3.1-RC9 at the moment) from the Kernel PPA mostly fix the hanging, and using KDE with the XRender compositing backend addresses the rest of the issues I have. OpenGL stability is still a disaster, but I don't really have any need it for anything. I'm not sure if native DisplayPort actually works yet; I got a small HDMI adapter to use instead. Using XFCE would probably work just as well, but don't expect stability from Compiz.

Oh, and if you use dm-crypt (which you should on a laptop) you'll get a stupid error from Grub on every boot unless you uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL=console in /etc/default/grub (&& run update-grub). For reference: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/699802

Oh, and I forgot that I had to disable powersave for the iwlagn driver in order to get any kind of performance out of it. I'm using the Intel 6300AGN; I tried to buy a 6200AGN from Amazon to try it out but Lenovo locks their BIOS to specific PCI product IDs.

If by any chance anyone else needs this, I just put a small shell script that runs "iwconfig wlan0 power off" in /etc/pm/power.d/wireless . The name is important because it overrides another script elsewhere with the same name.

There are probably other things I configured or changed that I can't recall right now. I need Linux to get my job done, but I'd be using VMware under Windows if I could get away with it. (For various hardware-development reasons I can't.) It really wasn't worth my time to figure all this out.

tl;dr: don't believe it, at least not for any recent Intel ThinkPads.

Counterpoint: I chose the ThinkPad X220 because it was on that list and it works (nearly) flawlessly under Linux. The only problem I know of is that the mic mute button doesn't work. That's it.

Unless you were naive enough to buy the X220 with the "Thinkpad b/g/n"[1] wireless option. Then, grief, anger, acceptance/resignation (in the form of a USB wireless stick[2]).

There is a host of other issues, but nothing that can't be worked around after hours of researching blog posts and manuals. More kernel panics on suspend (related to the aforementioned USB wireless), external monitor issues, USB 3 port disappearing ... You know, small stuff.

[1] RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter (in my case, anyway)

[2] SMCWUSB-N2

I checked this page also before buying: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/X220#Wireless

Which distribution of Linux? Do you use compositing? If so, what compositing window manager are you using? What's your typical uptime? Do you use multi-monitor? Have you used an 802.11n AP, particularly a 5GHz AP supporting WLAN power save (such as an AirPort Extreme)?

Under a different set of circumstances, Natty could have been said to be flawless on my T420, and indeed I thought it was for the first few days. When I started using the system more intensively for the tasks I bought it for, I began to notice the problems.

  - Distro: Ubuntu, then Fedora
  - Compositing: Yes
  - WM: Mutter
  - Uptime: weeks, currently 15 days
  - Multi-monitor: haven't yet, I could try and let you know what happens
  - 802.11n: No

I noticed on the notes for your laptop that you have an Nvidia graphics card. I had an Nvidia on my last laptop and that experience convinced me never to get a card that requires a proprietary driver. I always had issues with compositing, resuming from sleep, and artifacts appearing on my desktop (especially text corruption in terminals).

I'm also using an X220 and Linux, without problems. Debian Sid. Everything seems to work, no lockups (not using compositing though). Nice laptop.

I'm a 2011 MacBook Pro (8,1) owner who, due to some lapse of rational thinking, bought the laptop with the intent of running Linux on it from the get-go.

tl;dr -- Natty was a horrible experience for Sandy Bridge systems, but Oneiric has been much, much better.

I think this was the case for all SB systems during the Natty cycle. When SB dropped in the beginning of this year, the Intel code throughout the kernel (graphics, as well as general processor stuff) was pretty bad. I had a lot of lock-ups and freezes with those kernels back in the Natty beta (I got my MBP in early April, IIRC). Even after upgrading to the bleeding edge kernel (to get extmon support with integrated graphics), things were still pretty ugly (the biggest insult was the wireless card not working).

Suffice to say: I ran back to OSX screaming like a big, first-world-problem-having baby.

So, I labored until the hateful gaze of Cupertino for those six months (my work is done in a Windows VM so the host system doesn't matter, beyond what "makes me happy".. pleasure coding happened in an Ubuntu VM running awesome-wm). When Oneiric came around, I decided to give it another try and, I'm happy to say, they finally got their shit together. Anecdotally, I haven't had a single lock-up. I've gotten wireless working (was a bit of an effort and I have to rebuild kernel drivers whenever the update manager installs a new kernel) and the remaining issues are pretty minor: inferior battery life (paradoxically with better resource usage for my workflow), sub-optimal resolution on monitors, OSX vs Linux trackpad drivers, etc. But, overall, I'm much happier that I was able to stick it out (I was this close to offloading the machine on craigslist).

How are dual booting your MBP, with Bootcamp, or some other way? I've been thinking about doing that too but it's hard to find good info on how feasible it is.

I use rEFIt[0]. It's somewhat customizable/themable (you can change the icons, default partition, etc), but is otherwise nothing special/flashy. I've never used bootcamp, so I can't really do a feature comparison between the two. It gets the job done.

0 - http://refit.sourceforge.net/

Good enough, thanks. As long as it just works and there are no showstopping bugs I couldn't care less about the eyecandy.

notice how many specify "32 bit".

this is a joke for engineering laptops that need more RAM.

I have a T510, which is listed. it definitely doesn't work out of the box, and not all of the hardware (nvidia optimus for example) is fully supported.

What problems have you had with your T510? I have the T510 running 64-bit Ubuntu - it worked fine out of the box. I think the only thing I had to tweak was the auto-idle-brightness-reduction. Even dual monitor has worked just fine.

Admittedly this is 10.04 - I haven't tried the newer versions on it yet - and I didn't try to get Optimus working.

I do wonder why they're so careful about specifying 32-bit - I guess driver availability. Hopefully this shows Canonical and/or the laptop makers themselves are putting a higher priority on compatibility, so maybe 64-bit support won't be far off.

dual monitors where both monitors are the DVI docking station? fine

dual monitors where one is the onboard LCD and the other is a monitor connected via the VGA port? fine

three monitors, where one of them is the onboard LCD and the other two come from the DVI ports? nope! (this works in windows).

going from windows to ubuntu, there are three big things that i ran into: no 3 monitor support, less battery life, and wifi issues (google for ubuntu iwlagn, all kinds of awesome ways to get it work like iwconfig wlan0 mode 1M, welcome to 2001, and turning off g/n support)

also, suspend/resume has a 1/10 chance of not resuming. this is worse than window's 0/10 chances of not resuming (every. time. i pulled my windows T510 out of my bag and opened it, it was there. with linux? i cross my fingers)

(Not trying to dispute your experience, just presenting my own for balance, for the benefit of anyone trying to decide whether Ubuntu on a Thinkpad is viable.)

* Triple monitor: like you, I couldn't get this to work.

* Battery life: it's not been as good as in Windows, but it's been very acceptable if I tweak a bit using powertop. (Of course, I'd like it to be as good as in Windows.)

* Wifi: I have had no issues whatsoever; this worked perfectly out of the box, even with WPA, G/N, etc.

* suspend/resume: I've never had a problem with resume. About 1 time in 100 it will fail to suspend (which is just as bad, since I have to hard reboot to turn it off). It's been nowhere near 1 in 10 for me though. Easily reliable enough for me to not worry about.

How well wifi works depends on if you stick with the default "Thinkpad wireless" or you pay a bit extra for the Intel wireless stuff. Its well worth the extra $20 in terms of the Linux drivers being much better for the later, if nothing else.

Yes, my memory is a bit hazy but I think I had read (and followed) that advice when I bought my T510.

That sucks. Is the T510 a 64 bit system? I don't think Linux is quite there on 64bit (although I haven't tried it myself yet).

all intel x64 systems are capable of being 32 bit. also almost all non-netbook laptops are x64 systems now (and have been for many years). however, if you run 32 bit, you can address less RAM. so. have fun! :(

You can address up to 64 GiB of RAM with a PAE kernel. Happens that a single process can't access more than 4 GiB of RAM. But in the end, how many people actually run a process that large on a notebook?

> how many people actually run a process that large on a notebook?

my primary computer is a notebook and I routinely run processes that large (vmware, mathematica, matlab, IDA, binnavi, my own programs, etc).

"why do you run these programs on your laptop instead of sshing to a server somewhere?"

sensitivity, responsiveness, I don't always have internet, the hardware can do it (8-16GB of RAM in a notebook is almost commonplace)

What laptop are you using which supports 16gb of RAM? I'd love a portable computing juggernaut!

Thinkpad w510. I think some of the Mac laptops might. I'm sure some other systems support it.

We have a very large number of systems to test, and it is not feasible to test every system with both 32-bit & 64-bit. There are also requirements from the manufacturers to consider. (Please note, I don't perform the testing, so my knowledge is second hand.)

Personally, I'd rather see lots of 32-bit systems than a handful of 64-bit. :)

Why not test 64-bit first and only try 32-bit if it fails?

Desktops, Laptops and Netbooks are certified using the 32bit version of Ubuntu and Servers are certified using the 64bit version of Ubuntu Server Edition. This is based on the most common usage patterns we've seen.

Another answer is that it would lengthen an already long process.

That usage pattern only exists because 32-bit Ubuntu is selected by default and marked as "recommended" on your download page. People I know regularly download the 32-bit version even though I tell them to get the 64-bit version.

Why is 64-bit not the recommended option?

Why should it be?

PAE [1] is reported to work very well, so there's no RAM problem. Plus, things like ndiswrapper go a long way to highlighting Ubuntu's famous 'ease of use', and i imagine it's a huge hassle to get that working on x86_64.

64-bit is a higher number, but it's not instantly better in all situations. Larger pointers = effectively smaller cache, and the extra registers don't always make up for that.

_________________

1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnablingPAE

Yeah, they really should have specified "Not Optimus" or something under the T520. I have one also, for work, and graphics has given me no end of trouble.

EDIT: Are you sure you didn't mean to type "T520"? The T510 came out before Optimus was around, accoring to my recollection and a quick check on ThinkWiki.

If you click on the link under the name of the laptop they specify which hardware configuration they used, and the T520 very noticeably isn't certified for use with NVidia graphics, unlike the T510. http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201102-7229

I'm typing this on a T510 - it definitely has an optimus chipset. Linux support for Optimus is extremely poor, so fortunately you can set in the BIOS whether to use the integrated intel graphics chipset or the discrete nVidia chipset.

The laptop works very well in Ubuntu, which is my primary OS. There definitely were some setup hassles when I got the laptop a year ago, but I believe the support is more streamlined today.

One of the big issues we have (and have yet to solve) is that of SKUs - just because you have a T510' it doesn't guarantee that the components are 100% identical.

Suggestions (beside testing every possible combination, which simply doesn't scale) are welcome. :)

It would be nice to be able to see an optional list of just what hardware is in each laptop that you tested.

First benefit: The user could check that hardware against what he purchased or is purchasing and have a moderate amount of confidence that it's the "same thing" and not a SKU with something significantly different.

Second benefit: If you implemented a search, someone wondering whether an unlisted laptop is OK could make a good guess by searching for the presence of tested laptops with the same sound card, graphics card, etc.

We do that. Have you drilled down into the individual listings?

I'm currently working on displaying the 'core' (processor, network, display) components in the main listings to a) help differentiate between SKUs and b) stop you having to view each model to find the one you're interested in.

I did not drill down into the individual listing. Now I know! Cool.

> not all of the hardware (nvidia optimus for example) is fully supported.

As far as I know, Optimus is pretty much solely a drivers feature.

The optimus thing is annoying -- that specifically prevented me from buying an optimus equipped laptop when they came out. (IIRC nvidia gave no help at all to those attempting to provide linux drivers.)

I'm the maintainer of the application that provides these listings, and it's great to see them featured on HN. I'll try and reply to some of the comments, but feel free to ask any other questions.

Thanks

Years ago, I ran a "Linux Incompatibility List". You might consider the idea of something similar - a list of things to avoid because they're guaranteed not to work with Linux.

Do you consider a Broadcom 802.11n radio "compatible" even when Linux runs it in g mode?

It's showing my laptop (Lenovo x120e) on this list, but my laptop has known issues with the current wifi drivers which causes kernel panics.

There is an X100e and X121e listed, but no X120e. I've seen enough hardware listings to know that there's no guarantee of equivalence between models.

Not even between devices with exactly the same model numbers. I've seen batches of "identical" laptops arrive from the factory with a mix of Broadcom and Atheros wifi, for instance.

Yes. Device substitutions are hard enough, but device revisions add another layer of complexity.

It shows x120e right under the x1, no?

No. X1, X121e, X201.

http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/make/Lenovo/laptops

Ubuntu crashes on my T420 during installation despite T420 is listed there.

All systems are tested from a fresh install, therefore the installation is part of the certified status. Also see my comment about SKUs: a single model name can cover a multitude of incompatibilities.

Anecdotally, I've managed to crash my MacBook while installing OS X.

what should be done instead is a fork of Ubuntu designed to run well in the best laptop hardware out there: macbooks.

I'm not sure a fork is needed - I think as ever it's a question of drivers.

The existence of this page suggests that the listed PC manufacturers are at least to some extent cooperating, or even helping, with getting Ubuntu working on their hardware. Sadly, I can't see Apple taking the same attitude :( Are there any Linux fans inside Apple with 20% time?

Yep I mean to provide a zero-problems experience. Just put a CD inside and everything will work. Possibly with a selection of pre-installed beautiful open source software. So an "apple alike" experience for Linux users.

That sounds like how the current Ubuntu CD works on almost all hardware.

I needed 12 years of using only Linux to finally don't trust sentences like this without any need for debates or arguments. (I'm only using osx even if I would switch for ethical issues, but there is nothing similar IMHO).

EDIT: also even after the 12 years two years ago I tried again with a macbook, with very poor results.

I've been involved with around 1,500 Ubuntu installs over the last four years at http://www.freeitathens.org. It's rare for us to image a computer and not have everything just work. We're usually working on three to ten year old computers. If we saw more new computers, perhaps I'd be more pessimistic about linux support.

Ubuntu actually works really well on MacBooks - since Natty I've not had to do anything OOTB to use it on my MacBook Pro, and only minor tweaks for Maverick.

While you'll never see Apple hardware certified for Ubuntu, I expect we'll see lots of results on our crowdsourced hardware compatibility listings at http://friendly.ubuntu.com

Obviously I know that I'm working from a sample size of one, but when I bought my MacBookPro7,1 last spring I tried to put the latest Ubuntu on it (must have been 10.4) and it wouldn't even boot to the installer. Could not get it to do anything. Admittedly, it might be fixed now, but I would have expected the installer to be pretty robust and to fall back to generic drivers if there was some new unsupported hardware, and such was apparently not the case.

10.04 LTS was hard to get working, 10.10 less so, but 11.04 was the easiest. You should try again.

Is this also the case for current-generation MacBooks? On both of the last two occasions I researched this - 2 years ago and 1 year ago - the story was that on older MacBooks it would mostly work, though you might need to tweak to get some hardware (e.g. sound) working, and that on the current or previous generation of MacBooks it would require serious surgery to even boot.

TBH, even the tweaking to get sound working is more than I can be bothered with these days. I use Linux rather than OSX because it's better for my use cases and I want the option to tweak, not because I actually enjoy tweaking.

Would be great news if the support was better now.

Mine is a mid-2009 15" MacBook Pro. I can't speak for anything newer.

Typing this on a late 2010 MBP running 11.10. I started on 10.10 which needed modules and other bits from the mactel PPA for audio, backlight control, hotkeys etc to work properly. 11.04 was pretty good - just needed a wireless driver from the backports repository I think. 11.10 so far is working with the exception of 3-finger tap to middle-click in Unity. I've switched to KDE which is good enough, after some theming/tweaking.

From my sample of 1 I'd say Ubuntu Mac/Macbook support is good about 6-9 months after the first release by Apple. Before then it's hunting around forums, and PPAs.

I got Ubuntu 11.04 on an Air -- it was more convoluted than I would have liked, but a lot of that is how Apple set it up. The Air won't boot from an external disc unless you're using the Apple-branded drive, which seems a little silly.

The steps were pretty much (a) install refit (b) make a custom USB stick (usbnetbootin doesn't work) (c) create a partition from within OSX (d) install from the usb stick to the partition (e) Do a couple of fixes, such as blessing the correct drive to stop the really slow boot times.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleInt...

I've often thought this. To support the current lineup of MacBooks you'd need to test on 8 CPUs, 3 GPUs, and have basic support for Mac hardware across the line (keyboard, trackpad, webcam, etc). There might be some issues with writing drivers for devices that Apple has not provided any specs for, but once the effort is expended it'll work on a wide range of popular machines.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro

Someone could take the software in the Mactel Support PPA and integrate it with the installation media. Unfortunately, the big problems are drivers that still need to be developed upstream (e.g. broadcom 4331 wireless).

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro

That goddamn broadcom chip (enable powersaving on it and it degrades drastically, basically unusable, plus installing a proprietary driver is a huge pain in the ass if you're rolling your own kernels with any frequency) and the complexity of setting up EFI only boot -- you have to manually compile grub2, you need an HFS+ partition with a /EFI directory, and then you need OSX on separate media that you can boot into in order to 'bless' the partition as bootable -- are the two things keeping me from switching my MacBook to linux permanently.

The reduction in battery life when switching from OSX to linux is also annoying, but you can tweak stuff enough (via powertop, etc) that it's reasonable enough.

This.

I can't have an usable linux on my macbook and I tried hard. Main issues: ridiculous battery time and the fucked EFI boot.

I question the number of people who own macs that don't want to run OS X. As someone who owns a lot of macs, and even does kernel hacking on them on a regular basis, I'm infinitely more likely to (and, in fact, have) bought dedicated boxes to run Linux rather than wiping out a mac.

There's an argument, certainly, for supporting a small number of SKUs really well. But I don't think that the Apple machines are the right set of SKUs for the project.

I was shopping for a new laptop twice in the last three years. Both times, I would have bought a current-generation MacBook if it had run Linux reliably, based on the merits of the hardware.

This is less about existing Mac users switching to / dual booting Linux, and more about people who already know they want to run Linux choosing what hardware to run it on.

I've already chimed in elsewhere in this thread, telling my story (I'm an owner of a 8,1 MBP who bought my laptop just to run linux on it).

I've found that Ubuntu has the most "mature" Apple user community. They have their own PPA (which, sadly, seems to not be aging well.. still no Oneiric packages) and a pretty active sub-forum with a friendly crowd of regulars. From time to time, people (mostly Fedora users) come by to bum kernel patches and whatnot off of the locals.

That being said, a MacBook specific distro would be pretty cool, but I think that it'd be better to just get Canonical's ear and push work to their "upstream", as they seem pretty receptive; they have a mac-specific installer ISO (although I never use it.. it always gives me trouble). Also: they were really helpful, during the Natty beta cycle, responding to bugs with the Sandy Bridge integrated graphics sub-system (as the 2011 MBPs were pretty much, at that time, the only Sandy Bridge laptops in the wild). They actually turned me on to a bleeding edge kernel build that had upstream changes from the intel graphics team to get extmon and whatnot working (the quality of said bleeding edge kernel is another story, of course).

Note that there are other fully compatible laptops - but aren't listed due to not taking the Ubuntu certification.

For example, there is only one HP laptop there, and It's more than obvious that there are lot more HP laptops which run the default Ubuntu installation without problems.

Absolutely. Certified means we've got an agreement in place with the manufacturer to test specific models.

For everything else, we're started Ubuntu Friendly: http://friendly.ubuntu.com

This is a wonderful move. This would have saved me so much time if it had been around a year or so ago when I was shopping for a new laptop. (I went with the Thinkpad T510, which has worked flawlessly.)

That's the whole idea of the listings. :)

Does ubuntu, with 11.10, for any of these models, detect external displays automatically? Is this a feature that is just not in the current ubuntu, or something particular to 10.10 and my Dell?

It seems to automatically detect an external display on my HP Mini as of 11.04 (maybe sooner, didn't try). I can even switch between the displays using the dedicated key on the keyboard.

It has "support" for this, unfortunately support varies depending on your driver. e.g. Nvidia Quadro: http://www.brighthub.com/computing/linux/articles/31614/p2/ and some Radeons: http://niccolofavari.com/ubuntu-10.04-lucid-issues-with-exte... and so on.

Hopefully we'll see some ultrabooks on here in the upcoming months.

This is just what I was looking for. I was thinking about building an alienware laptop and duel booting to Ubuntu. My big issue was I didn't know where the problems were going to come in. Thanks!

Within those listings is the Component Catalog that lets you search for individual components (contained within the certified systems). There's no guarantee that individual components will work together, but it's better than not knowing at all.

Haven't tried them(yet), but http://www.system76.com looks promissing for fully Linux compatible computers, including laptops.

Bullshit.

They're listing "Preinstall only" for quite a few machines (including the Lenovo W520, which I just bought), but the "preinstall" image isn't available. In the US, you can only choose windows as your OS. You can't get the compatibility-tested version of ubuntu anywhere on that page, or anywhere else I've looked.

Rather tragic for an open-source operating system.

Note: I didn't look too far, I just installed arch instead.

Where can I find a Pre-install/Manufacturer image: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu-certification/+faq/1523

Why can't I buy a system with Ubuntu pre-installed on it?: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu-certification/+faq/1717

.. and they're full of excuses.

That sort of crap was why I thought Ubuntu was created. No more excuses for having to go through free & non-free repos, half-assed "it's meant for the enterprise" desktop configurations, etc.

Look, if I can't get the image that they're saying is compatible, it isn't compatible for me. It's empty sales-speak and has no business in free software.

Maybe you could list most common failing tests, let people decide what they could live without:

- wifi chipset

- vid cards (GPU set)

- sleep/resume

That's what Ubuntu Friendly (http://friendly.ubuntu.com) does.

A shame that Sony is not listed.. hopefully this page motivates Sony to certify them :)

Yeah. I like the look of the Vaio line a lot but I really want a machine that will run linux well. Ubuntu seems like it would be the best distro for a vendor to partner with.

I have Vaios since quite a few years and they generally worked. Only thing i wished that would work is the graphics switch from integrated graphics to seperate one...

Despite a netbook with the horrible GMA500 graphics (stay away from that crap as far as possible!).

Ubuntu-certified means that we (Canonical) have an agreement in place with the manufacturer to certify specific models.

We're hoping that the crowd sourced results on http://friendly.ubuntu.com will help more motivate manufacturers too.

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