[ltp] Preferred distro for Thinkpads?

[Charles E. "Rick" Taylor, IV]

On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 19:51 +0100, honey@gneek.com wrote:

> 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.

I've had very good results with the
kernel-2.6.11-1.14_FC3_cubbi1_swsusp2 kernel with an Ubuntu patch to
solve the Intel video problem and a few other tweaks.  Many, many
suspends and practically no problems.  (I keep my data backed up just in
case, but ...)  With my work schedule, I have much less time for bug
hunting these days.

> > 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.

That's why I said "to me". :)  Some people don't use power management at
all, and some folks survive with just suspend-to-ram.  Me, I almost
always use suspend-to-disk and almost never use suspend-to-ram.  And on
a desktop machine or server, it's pretty much a non-issue.

> 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.

It did scale the CPU speed, but it was not very responsive about it -
leading to some sluggish performance.  I haven't made much attempt to
quantify it beyond noticing that some CPU intensive things that I do a
lot are now a couple seconds faster.

[Dependency hell]

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

About the only place it seems to show up these days is in mixing and
matching repositories.  (Livna vs AT/Freshrpms, for instance).  It is
usually unnecessary, but people do it anyway for some reason.  Me, I
just use the official repos and freshrpms.  No problems.

-- 
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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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