Comments on: Don’t buy Linux laptops (atl1c fail)

By: Fierman

Fierman — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:21:09 +0000

I have Dell Inspiron and Atheros AR8152 Ethernet controller in it. If i really knew about this problem i will not buy this laptop and now i have to connect my laptop only to wireless network. Crazy stuff. In windows it works, but i did not buy laptop to use it with windows.
It looks like Dell are not user friendly about Linux, but i was always fan of them. I do not know, i am disappointed.

By: Salvadesswaran Srinivasan

Salvadesswaran Srinivasan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:28:38 +0000

My Samsung R418 has Atheros ethernet adapter, and Fedora 11 runs without a hiccup. Wonder why acer is so bad. The keyboard has really small arrow keys and many typos occur cos of that, the touchpad is downright useless. My notebook has no issues on Fedora 11, it didn’t have any OS when I bought it.

By: Bill Davidsen

Bill Davidsen — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 21:26:57 +0000

Of course this is one user’s opinion. I have had 4-5 Acer laptops and all ran Linux just fine. This laptop came with Linux. Perhaps the better advice is to avoid kernels where the drivers have been “updated” rather than “improved” or whatever. I believe the original kernel from FC11 initial release works fine, or so several people have said.

By: Caitlyn Martin

Caitlyn Martin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:11:08 +0000

My Sylvania g Netbook Meso came with Ubuntu Netbook Remix preinstalled and everything worked perfectly right out of the box. I’ve tried a bunch of different distros with it (I have the system setup to boot three distros at the moment) and most just work.

A blanket “Don’t buy Linux laptops” statement or headline is ludicrous. Some work very well indeed. Oh, and yes, that includes some Dell models.

@Anon: Linux preinstalled should ALWAYS mean out of the box hardware support if the manufacturer does it right. Which wireless chipset are we talking about? Linpus Light (which Acer uses) is nearly two years old. A modern distro with an up-to-date kernel likely would have had proper native support for the wireless chipset in the laptop. The fault here is Acer’s, not Linux in general.

If you were going to reformat with Windows anyway (complete with the virii, malware, spyware, and ultra-slow performance) then why do you care about Linpus? BTW, Linpus has a GUI and it shouldn’t have booted to the command line. Sounds like a flawed installtion to me.

Your question about FreeDOS tells me you have no idea about what Linux does or what it’s capabilities are.

By: Anon

Anon — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:22:50 +0000

My Acer laptop came with Linux pre-installed too. A command line minimal installation of a distro called Linpus, given that I would reformat the disk anyway with Windows, I thought that Linux pre-installed meant out of the box hardware support. Unfortunately, back then there was no wireless driver available for Linux, I had to install ndiswrapper and use the windows driver.
It doesn’t make sense, why not just slap FreeDOS on the thing if they just want to skip Windows?!

By: valent

valent — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:44:39 +0000

@Calin: I understand you, but what I’m trying to say is that we should not buy laptops from crappy vendors that don’t actually test their hardware on Linux but just slap the sticker on as an marketing afterthought! There are lots of laptops components that work great on Linux but they choose other components that are crap. Also there should be some standard that makes vendors more responsible. Making possible to install Linux kernel and get bash running doesn’t meet the conditions of what a “Linux laptop” should be able to do.

There are lot of vendors and small laptop companies that do Linux justice – like System 76. It they say their laptops run Linux they do 100%.

By: Calin

Calin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:35:25 +0000

I also had problems with Linux on some platforms due to the drivers and I understand you, but from there to the point where we are not buying laptops with Linux stickers, there is a big step. Let’s not forget that many notebooks have a sticker with Microsoft, and people are still buying them. The only difference is that from Windows you expect a lot of crap.
Personally I would prefer to buy the laptop without anything been installed on it, but I cannot find this to often in stores (at least in Europe…)

By: valent

valent — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:15:59 +0000

@Peter: eeePC has same manufacturer but different model of network card and uses different module. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.

By: valent

valent — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:13:34 +0000

@Martin: We are also compiling new 2.6.30 kernel and will report back, also the Atheros guys sent me the correct source for atl1c module, so keep watching…

By: valent

valent — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:12:11 +0000

@pootzko: I know you had some fun times with your Acer ;)