[ltp] Preferred distro for Thinkpads?

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

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

>> 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.

As I said, I'd be interested in a distro that does.  Fedora took a
decision not to include either version by default, I think on the basis
that right up until the present day, file corruption has been reported
on both swsusp1 and swsusp2 (the developers make no bones about it),
and they didn't want to ship a distro that may cause corruption.
See lkml for even relatively recent reports with swsusp1.

> Thankfully, there's
> http://mhensler.de/swsusp/download_en.php

Yep - very handy, and much used.  Suspend to disk's great if you're
knowledgable and prepared to take the effort to recover in case
of corruption.

> ... but using recent swsusp2 is pretty risky.

Well, I suffered about 20 very serious fsck's helping them fix a file
corruption problem recently, but didn't lose data. Some did, but it
may have been how they recovered (or didn't recover properly) ext3
journals.  So yes, it has a level of risk, as does swsusp1.

> To me, a laptop that
> can't suspend to disk is just BROKEN.

Debatable, but one that runs a known risk of file corruption is also
debatably broken.  Thus the problem in each distro trying to decide
what to enable, to make them usable by novel users as well as geeks.

> 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.

Cpuspeed always worked for me without intervention - in fact you
can't modify its behaviour much, except things like how often it
runs.  I suspect this is the major difference between
userspace+cpuspeed and ondemand - I could have turned up the
frequency at which cpuspeed runs.  But if it didn't scale your CPU
speed out of the box without intervention, something's wrong there
with cpuspeed and its interaction with your machine.
>
>>   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.)

Yes, but that's a decision every distro has to make: utility vs.
likelihood of a possible lawsuit and disappearance.  Other distros take
other views, which is fine, and I think the Fedora project's made it
pretty easy to fix: a couple of commands.  http://www.fedorafaq.org
answers nearly every standard complaint thrown at Fedora with an
immediate fix.

> 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.

Yes - but it appears some people still think it's a feature of Red
Hat based distros.  Just trying to set the record straight.

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

No no - just trying to balance a few comments.  Fedora gets an
unfairly bad press - when you can't bash Microsoft, they're the
nearest target.

Honey