On 11/02/2017 09:29 AM, Sorin Srbu wrote:
Hello all,
I'm looking into getting HP laptops for our department running CentOS 7.
Last time I checked this was some five or so years ago, and when I look at
https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops, nothing much seems to have happened
since.
At that time, I had to give up CentOS on laptops, as both Wi-Fi and graphics
wasn't too well supported with CentOS 5 and 6.
Is the situation better now with CentOS 7?
We're only allowed to buy the HP, Dell and Apple brands here at this
university, so what I'm looking at is basically HP. Apple is not of interest
because of their pricing.
All our desktops and laptops are HP's running Windows 7 and 10, and they
work fine.
We do have some Dells, but only in the server area.
Currently all our CentOS 6 and 7 workstations are custom built OEMs used for
molecular modelling, but are now getting rather long in the tooth.
I have a laptop at the office as a backup, running Ubuntu 16 LTS, as that
was the only thing that found all the hardware properly at the time.
However, I'd rather not go down that particular road for various reasons.
The thing that interests me first and foremost is whether the latest CentOS
7 iteration will install right out of the box with all hardware properly
detected, no manual compiling of drivers or jumping through hoops to _maybe_
getting stuff to work with eg a HP Elitebook 850 G4.
Anybody care to chime in with a comment or hint on the laptop situation
and-or their experiences?
For two years now I've been semi-happily using an HP Envy with the
high-end Nvidia graphics card. Installing CentOS7, everything worked
out of box except the wifi. The problem there was due to the drivers
requiring a v.3.5 kernel which centos doesn't yet have. There were some
very occasional glitches in the video, but subsequent upgrades to the
nvidia drivers eventually fixed those.
Audio worked initially, but after installing vlc I've had problems which
I haven't been able to track down, so the sound with some apps just
doesn't work. Notably, anything audio through firefox doesn't work
except that which uses flashplayer. Audacity and vlc work just fine.
The body of the laptop is solid, made mostly out of carbon fiber... it
seemed like it's bullet-proof. The pop-out DVD tray I got is really
flimsy, so must be handled quite gingerly. I've read that it's been
upgraded by HP to more solid version in more recent incarnations of the
Envy.
I've never used the bluetooth, so I can't testify to how well that
works, but I've never seen/read any complaints about it, so I'd assume
it works.
Of the six or more laptops I've owned in my life, the keyboard of this
one has been absolutely the most difficult one to get used to. It seems
that if I don't hit a key square in the middle of the key, that
character doesn't make it to the screen. Same failure if I press the
key too hard. This craps on my typing speed immensely, I used to type
at over 100 words/minute, but I'm now down to less than half that...
sucks big time.
It's nice that it has a big touchpad and I use it all the time. Only
very seldom to I plug in a usb mouse (e.g., in Blender). But it's way
too easy to accidently touch the touchpad, resulting in all kinds of
random mayhem. So I modified some code I found to disable/enable the
touchpad and mapped that code to [Ctrl-`] so that it operates as a
toggle. Problem therewith nicely solved.
Talking with folks on a suse list about the sound problem, I learned
that they have have no sound problems with there and, further, my
problem might be a messed up packman stack... whatever that is. Suse
also has a much higher kernel version than we do in centos, so switching
over to suse is in the works. That's sad because I've been a happy
RH/centos guy for a long time.
Hope this review is helpful.
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