On Tuesday 12 September 2006 23:33, Ken wrote: > Check out these laptops with pre-installed Ubuntu... > No hassles!?! > http://system76.com I can't speak for System 76 (going to their site and seeing "ultralight" and "starting at 5 pounds" together just made me laugh), but I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X41 with Ubuntu preinstalled from Emperor Linux. They have a reputation as being one of the oldest and best surviving Linux laptop dealers. Here's my experience: I ordered the thing on the Friday before LinuxWorld, which may explain some of the following. Their website indicated that the laptop was in stock. A week and a half and a ton of emails and phone calls later, it turned out that not only was the laptop not in stock, but had been discontinued. They bumped me up to the next higher model, which I guess was nicer than just cancelling my order out from under me. I finally got it after not quite 3 weeks of trying to make do with an old, cranky Via C3 laptop since my own laptop's IDE had died. (Meanwhile, the web site still indicated, right up until the day before my replacement model arrived, that the one I ordered was "in stock, order now".) There were some issues with the preinstalled stuff. This Thinkpad is a tablet, and they preinstalled Wacom support (which is... or was... really nice) and two different handwriting programs. One was Jarnal, which was apparently hardcoded to use a newer JRE than they had installed. The other was Rosetta, which is more like Graffiti on a Palm than handwriting recognition. They neglected to include the trainer program for it, so it doesn't do anything. They also included a driver, seemingly written by a non-English-speaker, for the thumbprint scanner on the edge of the screen. I don't really believe in that stuff, but I tried it out anyway.... it works at console login prompts but not the normal Ubuntu gdm login screen. Naturally, since their main distro is Fedora and they have only recently started supporting Ubuntu, they installed everything in /opt and just seem to have dumped the files out there rather than making and installing packages. I mention this because this is my first Ubuntu experience and it sure would have been nice if as many files as possible were owned by packages so I can figure out what depends on what. More seriously, they neglected to mention that the version of X.org they included (needed for the xrandr stuff so you can flip the lid around and use it as a tablet) had no GLX support, and the custom kernel they rolled had no snd-usb-audio module (making it kinda hard to use my Midiman 1x1 or my Roland PCR-30 or Edirol UA-30), nor did it have the Ingo Molnar patch. I requested that patch, but told them to never mind when they told me that applying it would add 3-4 days to my delivery time. Judging by the fact that their Ubuntu rescue instructions make reference to installing RPM's, I get the sense they don't like to stray too far from the script. They gave me a fix for the Jarnal thing, though I'm sure I would have figured it out eventually. All the other problems are still outstanding, and when I asked whether I would get the X.org update that provides GLX free of charge, they clammed up and I haven't heard from them since. If you google around a bit, Emperor Linux has a reputation for ignoring emails but answering the phone right away.... that is, if you call during business hours. My "dick around with my notebook" time is pretty much right now, at 2 in the morning, since I can't exactly call when I'm sitting there at a client site. Anyway, I can confirm that that reputation is deserved. So then, when I built the snd-usb-audio module and did make modules_install (long after a member of their target market would have thrown up his hands in frustration), the laptop's wireless card stopped working (dmesg says it wouldn't take the firmware.) I switched to a stock Ubuntu kernel, and now I have wifi and MIDI with no compiling or hand-tweaking needed -- meaning they actually DISABLED the USB audio stuff on their custom build -- but no tablet functions whatsoever. On the plus side, I love the Thinkpad itself.... much nicer than my old Dell X200, though I wish I could mute the console beep since it's far louder than the sound card output. When the tablet stuff works, it's sweet to be able to open up the GIMP and just draw something, or fire up Jarnal and jot down network diagrams and notes and stuff. And now that I'm running a stock kernel, MIDI is plug-and-play. But was this experience worth the $800 markup over the stock Thinkpad tablet ($1000, if they hadn't given me the upgrade for nothing?) Ummm.... no. No way, no how. Do I have time to demand my money back and then buy and wait for another laptop? I hate to say it because they're really nice and all their help speaks English and I want Linux laptops to be a viable market.... but, I kinda wish I did. (Going back to the plus side, at least I still haven't been tempted to boot the thing into XP.) In conclusion, I'd go with a Linux laptop dealer if you want all the builtin stuff to work and never plan to hook up another device to it.... but if you want to do Linux audio, you'll probably spend more time trying to get it to work without wrecking all their custom stuff (or recovering from it when you do) than you would have spent just buying your laptop of choice and installing your distro of choice and rolling your own kernel with your choice of patches and modules. Hassle-free? Not even close. No one is serving our market yet, and it may be a while before anyone does. I actually think Ubuntu (or something else, but it sure is looking like ubuntu) is going to have to become the worldwide standard before things like universal "it just works" peripheral support and actual hassle-free notebook preinstalls start happening. Sorry for the rant, but when it costs a grand more to get free software preinstalled, I think people should see what they're getting into before they do it. Rob
