laptops most compatible with Linux

What works, and doesn't, for you. Be specific, and please include Puppy version.
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8Geee
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#16 Post by 8Geee »

eeePC's with model #'s 900<X<1010 and most Acer Aspire One's do well with Puppy > 3.0.1 Lots of these used in the usual places on-line. Many used ones come with Ubuntu or Mint already installed.

Naturally, best thing about Puppy is if NO or borqed HDD, a USB stick solves.

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8Geee
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Bill3
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#17 Post by Bill3 »

Goodwill Industries, a non-profit organization that provides job training, refurbishes and sells donated laptops. On newer laptops, they install Windows 10 Home; Mint 19 on older machines. I'm assuming that anything that runs Mint 19 can be made to run Puppy and planning to buy one of the older ones if I can find one that looks good. I see recommendations on this thread for Acer Aspires, Dell Inspiron and Latitudes, and Thinkpads. Are there any others you would especially recommend or any older laptops or components that should be avoided?

Bill3

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Mike Walsh
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#18 Post by Mike Walsh »

@ Bill3:-

I think if there were any real 'stinkers' to avoid, we'd know about them by now.

Certain brands have always been a reliable bet where Linux is concerned. Dell, for instance; even today, you can buy Dell models with Linux pre-installed. The Thinkpads (IBM- or Lenovo-built), appear to be another. Apparently Richard Stallman himself swears by Thinkpads!

Most can usually be 'coaxed' into running Puppy in one fashion or another. There's nothing special about Windoze code, as compared to Linux.....it's all 'machine-code', as far as your CPU's concerned. Much of it boils down to stuff like driver availability, and BIOS support; basic stuff like that.

We've had our old Inspiron 1100 for coming up to 16 years now. It was purchased at the time when you generally bought direct from Dell.....before they starting selling through the High Street dealers & chainstore outlets. It's always been as good as gold, provided small amounts of semi-regular maintenance are lavished upon it; mostly centering around care for the heatsink, and keeping ventilation maximised. These things were built at a point in time before the low-power mobile CPUs we're all used to even existed, and ran with 'full' desktop CPUs inside them.....and Pentium 4's were notorious for running hot, even in a desktop tower. Imagine that in a small, enclosed space.....

It's on its second 'power-brick', third battery, and apart from the afore-mentioned CPU & RAM upgrades, it's had the internal storage upgraded twice; once from HDD to SSD, and then again to a larger SSD.

I'd recommend Dells to anyone who wants a trouble-free Linux experience, whatever distro you eventually go with.


Mike. :wink:
Last edited by Mike Walsh on Sun 01 Dec 2019, 11:11, edited 1 time in total.

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bigpup
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#19 Post by bigpup »

If you are going with old used laptops.

Intel parts are going to be best supported.
Intel integrated graphics in early days had issues. Intel was still trying to get it right.
Early 2008 they released the complete developer documentation for their hardware, so Linux developers could really build third party drivers.
Intel Linux drivers are very good now if the hardware can use the Intel i915 driver.
Nvidia graphics hardware has better Linux support.
Nvidia makes drivers for Linux and the generic Nouveau driver is not bad now.

Try not to get anything using Brodcom hardware for wifi.
The things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem.
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Burn_IT
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#20 Post by Burn_IT »

BROADCOM

just correcting.
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bigpup
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#21 Post by bigpup »

See, you cannot even get it to spell correctly! :lol:
The things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem.
When I was a kid I wanted to be older.... This is not what I expected :shock:
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Dingo
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#22 Post by Dingo »

What about asus vivobook series (especially vivobook X540MA-GQ024) ? I remember Barry Kauler bought a vivobook some time ago and everything was working
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olddog
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#23 Post by olddog »

Thinkpads are superb, especially the T series.

I am running Xenial64 on an Edge 15 - my sofa laptop; and also on a T61 - my music machine which feeds a DAC connected to the hi-fi.

The T61 is quite elderly (2007) but is quite fast enough thanks to Puppy and an SSD.

T Series are expensive when new and still feel good many years later. I have a couple of broken T42s which I am trying to fix, and a T430 running Windows pro tem.

The T42s came out in 2004, so are really too old now for serious use, but the T61 is OK, and the T430 (2013) is still a very competitive machine. It was the first Thinkpad to sport USB3 ports so is the one to go for if you want an inexpensive but (relatively) modern laptop.

Bill3
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#24 Post by Bill3 »

Thanks for all of the good information. I'll watch what becomes available and you'll probably know what happened when I show up looking more help making things work. The assistance here is always much appreciated.

Bill3

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Burn_IT
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#25 Post by Burn_IT »

My daily machine is a T43P maxed out.
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olddog
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#26 Post by olddog »

Burn_IT wrote:My daily machine is a T43P maxed out.
I should perhaps have written that the T42 is not suitable for serious play. It's quite powerful enough for things like spreadsheets, but I believe it can struggle to cope with lots of web pages, and the screen proportions are not ideal for watching films.

I'm about to replace the T61 that supplies music to the HiFi system with a T42. If I did a lot of writing I would much prefer to type out deathless prose on a typical 4:3 T42 screen than on a modern 16:9.
Linux novice with too many Thinkpads, mainly running Xenialpup
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labbe5
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Installing Lenovo Firmware Packaged as a .exe

#27 Post by labbe5 »

https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/exe-f ... linux.html
My new Lenovo Carbon X1 Gen 7 has one irritating problem: the trackpad sometimes disappears, flooding dmesg with messages like "i2c_designware i2c_designware.1: controller timed out". Once this happens, the only fix is to reboot.

Lenovo has a fix -- new trackpad firmware -- but unlike their BIOS updates, which are installable from Linux, device firmware updates are distributed as Windows EXE files that require running Windows on the bare metal, leaving Linux users out in the cold. Ironic, since Lenovo is so popular among Linux users and is a member of the Linux Firmware Service, and the CX1 is supposedly Ubuntu certified.

Those Linux users on the forums who managed to install the firmware update raved about it, saying that indeed it solved their problem. But finding a way to to install it led me on a not-so-merry four-day quest.

Here's how I installed the firmware, in the end:

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mikeslr
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#28 Post by mikeslr »

Well, labbe5, it wasn't "the end". You put a ":" at the end. :lol:

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