On 11/18/2011 12:45 PM, Stuart Jansen wrote: > I'm willing to pay for quality, but it seems that most laptops today > are either crappy toys, crippled by sucky screens, or Macs.
So an issue to be aware of with Linux on today's laptops is DSDT, part of ACPI in the BIOS. More and more laptops today are shipping with some horrible ACPI bugs that Microsoft is both responsible for, and works around in Windows because of corrupt DSDT tables. This little table, if compiled with Intel's tools, works quite nicely under Linux. But most vendors are now shunning the standard free tool from Intel and using Microsoft's compiler which produces buggy tables that interfere with Linux's ability to properly use ACPI. Hence laptops have problems sleeping or poor battery life. Some laptops have bad tables that actually report different hardware power capabilities if the OS reports itself as "Linux." It's a real mess, and a real black art to fix it. People say, "decompile the table and fix the errors and recompile it" without really telling you how to fix the errors. I tried to recompile the DSDT on my netbook and it had something like 6 major syntax errors. I managed to eliminate the compile errors them by googling for each and every error. Once I had my fixed DSDT table I found that Fedora doesn't even support overriding the DSDT at boot like Ubuntu does. Fedora maintainers simply hold the old tired line, "it's the hardware's fault; Linux is just following the spec so go away," which I've found is quite common in the Linux world. Google for "Linux DSDT" for more information on this issue, which in mind mind should be getting more attention than it is. I first found out about it when I was trying to figure out why my netbook won't actually get through the initial kernel boot without me continually pressing a key. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
