[ltp] Preferred distro for Thinkpads?

[Charles E. "Rick" Taylor, IV]

On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 18:26 +0100, honey@gneek.com wrote:

> 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.

The main machines that have given me fits under Fedora are a machine
with Intel video (i855) and a Thinkpad X22 (radeon, but OLD radeon).
Solved, but it kinda irked me to have to patch Fedora's kernel with
Ubuntu's kernel patches (for the Intel-based laptop) to get it to work
right.

> 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).

... and swsusp2 is ALSO not provided.  Hence, patching the kernel and
recompiling.  Thankfully, there's

http://mhensler.de/swsusp/download_en.php

... but using recent swsusp2 is pretty risky.  To me, a laptop that
can't suspend to disk is just BROKEN.  APM on my Thinkpad X22 works well
enough, thankfully.  It makes every kernel update an adventure, though -
just to find out if that particular update broke APM again. :)

Ubuntu includes the old software suspend, but it actually worked out of
the box on my test Thinkpad.  I was, to put it mildly, shocked.  This
stuff is NEVER supposed to work out of the box. :)

> 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.

Ondemand actually works really well.  The userspace stuff that shipped
with Fedora had some ... odd ideas about what "demand" was.  I could
have probably tried to configure the userspace thing, but the kernel
governor acts a lot more sane - and as you say, it just takes loading
the module and stopping the userspace process.

> 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.

It might be more reasonable to prefer apt-get to *yum*, but the only
dependency problems I've had on Fedora are the occasionally out-of-sync
mirrors - where yum notices available updates, then tries to download
them from a different server that doesn't have them yet.

The speed of yum could be improved a bit, though.  I used to think
apt-get was slow ... then I used yum.  :)

>   Yum and
> apt-get are freely available and installed with sensible and
> comprehensive repositories in Fedora Core 4,

Well, unless you want mp3 or dvd support. :)  (Yes, I do know how to get
it.)  

>  and dependency hell
> relegated to something you had to go through in Red Hat Linux 7.3, a
> long time ago. 

Real dependency hell for me was Redhat 5.2.  By the time 7.3 came out,
I'd discovered FreshRPMs.  Otherwise, I'd probably have gone back to
Slackware.

> 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.

I'm no developer, either.  I do try to file the occasional bug report
for Fedora, though.  A few of them even got fixed. :)

> Distro wars are so SO dull,

I *hope* you didn't read my post as starting a distro war.  

-- 
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*  Charles E. "Rick" Taylor, IV <tomalek@mindspring.com>
*  Chemistry instructor / Mad scientist / Linux enthusiast!
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*  Web: http://home.mindspring.com/~charletiv/
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