I wonder if any of you have opinions on Gentoo on a laptop. I realize that the usual set-aside-a-day-to-compile-kde rules apply, but other than that, is Gentoo a wise choise for laptops? My theory is that as Gentoo is very customizable, and as you _have_ to compile your own kernel, the odds that you're gonna get your hardware working is good.
Hi Johnny,
I'm running Gentoo on a Compaq Evo N800c, that is a 1.7GHz Intel P4 Mobile, 512MB RAM and ATI Radeon 7500 w/ 32megs. It's running Win2k as well as Gentoo with KDE and GNOME.
Whatever Linux will do for you, Gentoo will do, too. The Problem is: Not all kinds of hardware do have proper drivers and software, i.e. talking about ACPI which does not work on this machine given the current patches on gentoo-2.4.20-r5. Same applies to the internal modem which I couldn't use under Linux yet, while PCMCIA works surprisingly well. And there have always been issues with the ATI card, sometimes the screen just stays dark until I switch the terminal to another and back.
In my opinion, gentoo is better suited for laptops than other distro's because you've always the latest stable software configured in a reasonable way. But it wouldn't help you if you run into troubles because of lacks of functionality of the software itself. So if you are a true road warrior with ever-changing needs (dialup, networking, graphics, suspend/hibernation, changing hardware all the time, different printers every day) according to where you actually work, you might be better of not using Linux. *sigh* OK, I'll put my asbestos on, start the flame...
However, if you're laptop is actually some kind of mobile desktop configuration with mostly static config, it could be fine for you using Linux. I'd be interested in hearing how this worked for you. Regards,
- Christian
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