[ltp] Preferred distro for Thinkpads?

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Charles E. "Rick" Taylor, IV wrote:

> [rant mode]
> I am used to Fedora, but d*mn if they don't make it hard to use on a
> laptop.  Want suspend-to-ram to work without turning off 3D accel?
> Patch and recompile the X server and kernel.  Want suspend-to-disk to
> work?  Patch the kernel and recompile.  Want speedstep to work
> correctly?  Load a kernel module, disable that userspace CPU junk that
> Fedora ships with.  Waving a dead chicken around might help, too.
> [/rant mode]
>
> Okay, I'm better now.  Really.  :)

Very odd problem you have there, Charles - suspend to ram works
fine for me with Xorg drivers (and I get 3D from them on my card).
Maybe you're using ATI's drivers, in which case, well, we know the
quality of them.

Suspend to disk?  Maybe you mean old swsusp v1, about to be deprecated
- yes, I think that's disabled in the Fedora kernel for good reason
(see Fedora mailing lists).  I'm not sure if any distro ships patched
with swsusp2 (=suspend2) which is likely to be merged into the kernel
soonish, but I'd be interested if they do.  It wouldn't seem wise
as swsusp2 is such a moving target still - serious file corruption
issues pop up and are squashed now and again.  Most distros will want
to avoid the possibility of this for novice users: ones who can
recover complex filesystems damage can easily rebuild a kernel.

As to changing CPU speeds, Fedora ships with userspace on by default,
along with cpuspeed, which should change your CPU accordingly.
Cpufreqd and various other userspace governors are of course
available in repositories, and yes, the ondemand governor is
available as a module, I suspect because they wanted to apply some
user discretion and caution.  Having seen the results with it, I'd
agree that ondemand is preferably for me at least to
userspace+cpuspeed, but it's a two-liner to enable it.  CPU scaling
should have been working for you out of the box.

As to the several comments on dependency hell, preferring apt-get to
rpm -ivh, etc, all I can say is, please understand that if you run
into such problems on Fedora, you're not reading up on it.  Yum and
apt-get are freely available and installed with sensible and
comprehensive repositories in Fedora Core 4, and dependency hell
relegated to something you had to go through in Red Hat Linux 7.3, a
long time ago.  If you have any examples of your own private hells,
please mail me off list and I can show you how you should have
approached this.

I hate to be an apologist for Fedora and must emphasise I'm not a
developer for the project, and have used plenty of other distros.
I've just settled on it, am very happy with it on my T40, and
feel a mite protective as it's the most constantly bashed distro.
Distro wars are so SO dull, including Debian bashing, and that's
why I was quick to reply to the original mail asking for the "best"
distro for a thinkpad, saying there wasn't one.  In an attempt to
stop this happening.