The Mac and Windows Alternative: My Linux Laptop
A few weeks ago, I seriously thought about buying either Apple's latest MacBook or a Windows laptop where I could dual boot between the laptops native operating systems and Linux. In the end, I chose to install Linux on a three year old laptop. This old laptop isn't just any laptop but one of the first sub-$1000 laptops that hit the United States market. The laptop is the Averatec 3220 and over time I've found it just too sluggish for running Windows XP.
This old Averatec 3220 had a lot of negatives going its way for installing Linux. The laptop is from a company that almost no one knows so
support was limited. Even Google had a tough time helping me
find "best practices" for installing Linux on this particular laptop
model. This particular laptop includes an AMD Athlon XP-M 2000+ processor, 512 MB RAM (upgraded from the original 256 MB), a 12.1 inch screen, and both Ethernet and wireless networking capabilities. The laptop could barely be considered "up to date" with regards to hardware, although its exterior is designed well and doesn't look dated like other laptops of the same age.
Before I discuss my troubles with installing Linux on this laptop, let me first talk about the positives. During the past two weeks, using Linux on this laptop has been pure joy.
While the purpose of this home laptop is just to do a little surfing with the Internet browser, reading e-mail, some light word processing, and secure shelling into my personal servers...Linux has brought new life into the Averatec. Boot up time that was once counted in minutes using Windows XP Home has now literally dropped to seconds with Linux. Where Windows XP needed a lot more memory and used the hard drive often for its virtual memory, Linux barely produces a bead of sweat and rarely needs to access the drive. Once Linux was installed and configured, I found that everything just works.
My experience with not only this Linux laptop, but the number of Linux desktops and Linux servers under me at work, convinces me Linux is ready rumble with Apple and Microsoft. I'm convinced that once Linux is properly installed on a laptop or PC, the operating system can easily compete with Windows and the Mac. Those days of asking what can't you do with Linux are simply over and have little place in discussions of today.
The problem, as I already alluded, installing Linux on a laptop or PC can be a hassle. I tried four or five distributions (including Ubuntu 7.10, Kubuntu, openSuSE, Fedora Core 8) and each one failed to load on the laptop in the install process and it was a very miserable time for me. The distribution that I had the best luck for the Averatec 3220 was Ubuntu (and in some respects Kubuntu). However, even with Ubuntu 7.1, I found once the operating system installed I still had problems. I didn't have network access regardless if I was using either the network card or the wireless card. Not having any network capability on the laptop proved to be an agonizing uphill battle for toubleshooting and made it difficult for installing the "drivers" and patches needed to "fix" the problems I was having.
In the end, I found adding pci=noacpi noapic to the kernel call up in grub fixed my wired network problems. Once that problem was solved (only took me three days to figure that one out) I was able to get the necessary kernel patches/drivers/updates needed to bring Ubuntu Linux fully alive on the laptop. Eventually, wireless capability was returned to the laptop and I finally began to enjoy my Linux experience.
Two weeks later, I can't be happier with my new Linux laptop than I already am. As a bonus, I can still dual boot into Windows when I need it (though I found I haven't really needed Windows). The problem though is that I pulled a lot of hair out trying to get to where I am now with the Linux laptop. I may forgive, but it's hard to forget about my experience. It will still be quite some time before I recommend the less computer literate to try to install Linux at home.
Having the difficulties that I did has convinced me that the biggest benefit to an Apple Mac over Linux isn't really the Mac's desktop or operating system. Let's be honest here, the Mac is basically just Unix and the Gnome/KDE Linux desktops are quickly catching up to the whole Mac experience. No the biggest benfit to a Mac over Linux is that Apple has installed the Unix operating system for you. Until more PC and laptop manufactures get behind Linux, Mac will continue to reign in the arena of the Unix/Linux dektop installed on the home PC and laptop. That would make me sad, except I'm too happy using my Linux laptop to do anything but smile.
About the Author
Bryan Ruby is owner and editor for CMS Report. He founded CMSReport.com in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers desired visiting sites where they could learn more about content management systems without the sales pitch. Although Bryan has been active in the content management community for a number of years, please do not call him a CMS expert. Bryan's preference is to be labeled a CMS enthusiast.
Outside of his late night blogging hours, he is the Information Technology Officer for a field office in the federal government. Away from the computer he enjoys his family, bicycling, camping, and the outdoors.
Comments
#1 Mac users don't like Linux
#2 You can always check out the
#3 mac users and linux
#4 Cory Dcotorow long time Mac Supporter
#5 Linux is as Linux does...
What I mean by that is OS installs are like a box of chocolates... you never know what you're gonna get. Linux installations are a dime a dozen - actually, they're mostly free. Normally, you get what you pay for - in most distros (after the installation is completed), you get basically the same package from them all. You end up with a viable computer which can handle some multimedia but can't really hold a candle to the likes of Apple's iMovie/iDVD combo or even Windows' Movie Maker software. And it certainly can't stand up to more professional, shrink-wrapped applications.
Linux is still crawling today. It may run older systems with less strain but you're basically left with (just) a computing device. I've installed a number of distros on my aging Pentium III laptop (which is used solely for experimentation). Some can enable the 3D desktop, some can't (same hardware, different software capabilities). Oddly enough, XP runs the laptop with less fan noise than any Linux distro. Does this mean it's running "lighter?" Not necessarily because Apple movie trailers run choppier on XP (on this hardware) than on Linux. On the other hand, Linux had some problems keeping the audio and video synched during playback.
If you just need a basic computing experience and you're okay with learning how to install a troublesome distro, Linux might be for you. If you want to run anything under the sun on your non-Apple hardware, Windows is the only solution. It's so huge in the marketplace, it's a world standard. Keep it behind a decent firewall and arm it with Spybot Search & Destroy and AVG, stay away from unsrcupulous software and Web sites and you should be fine. Just like you wouldn't park your car in a bad neighborhood or pick up a hitchhiker, you shouldn't click on links you know are probably leading to bad sites and you shouldn't install software you know is illegal on your system. Common sense, people!
As far as Linux is concerned, give it another few years and it'll come around. By then though, will Ubuntu have gone the way of Gentoo?
#6 Jeff is wrong!
#7 That is Qtpfsgui
Hmmm...I hadn't heard of Qtpfsgui before...I 'll have to have my wife (who has spent a small fortune in photography software for her Mac, IMHO) take a look at it and let me know what she thinks. Thanks.
For those interested: http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/
#8 For photography on Linux you may be interested in this
#9 Linux is superior, yet inferior
My wife has a Mac. I use Fedora 8. The Mac was a mistake. It's desktop is so inferior side-by-side with a modern linux distro. It's software installation and management is an utter mess. There is no consistency. And you are also stepping on demo-software and such. Too much is proprietary as well. The mac we had was buggy as well (though my early Fedora 8 was a bit shaky as well for awhile).
I am completely underwhelmed with Mac. Maybe Leopard is better, but it had better be a *vast* improvement. My wife wants a Linux laptop now. *sigh* I was trying to "help her" with the new supposedly sexy thing. Grr!
You mention Qtpgsgui. I will have to check that out. Gimp and Inkscape have utterly replaced any need for photoshop and illustrator. Those applications are now toast. You can start to watch their decline now. :)
Mac beats Fedora (and other Linuxes hands down on a couple things):
1. monitor manipulation
2. network switching
3. sleep - though only marginally (many time that mac never came out of sleep)
The biggest hurdle with a Linux box is initial setup and making sure you have the right video card. But once configured well, it is far superior to the mac. Hands down.
#10 Similar Viewpoints
Todd, I agree on a lot of what you say. About the only thing I disagree with you though is with Photoshop being toast. For my wife, as a semi-professional photographer, she needs Photoshop. She needs Photoshop not so much because of the features it brings, but the similar culture it brings for her with other photographers. When anyone has a question in the forums she visits...the how-to, advice, best practices almost refer back to Photoshop.
I'd like to see Linux get some of these killer-apps. Could you imagine the impact getting PhotoShop, iTunes, or even MS Office would have if it was also marketed for the Linux desktop? Yes, I know there is open source alternatives to this software (and/or work-arounds to install in Linux)...but it seems to me the time for Linux to have the best of both worlds is just around the corner.
#11 Linux/Mac laptop
Just a piece of advice here.
It's very easy to just install Linux on an Intel Mac box, I did so on a Mac I have, at work. I even managed to have both installed and bootable, by using the excellent mac bootloader called rEFIt (a breeze to install).
Therefore I think your wife can keep her shiny Mac laptop, and keep the benefit of using both MacOSX when necessary, and Linux the rest of the time, at no supplementary cost.
#12 Mac is serious business
Great post. So many people don't know how we can set linux on an intel mac box. We have to give credit to the community, in a way we managed to let everyone benefit from a same OS and offer an alternative to Leopard and Windows when it doesn't seem to work for us. When money is out of the way and people work for what they love, this is when we manage to do such great things.
#13 Linux vs the rest
yes Linux can be a bit 'fiddly' to set up on some hardware. I remember having a tough time getting wireless networking to run on a card that had no Linux drivers. Yes that's right no Linux drivers! But I managed it. That PC is still happily running, wireless network and all, over a year later. I got it to work in the end using ndiswrapper and some windows .inf files. What other OS can you tell me of that supports this kind of versatility? If you buy a device for windows or a mac and there are no drivers you're sh*t out of luck!
Personally I don't want to have to run my computer in such a way that I have to be wary of certain 'types' of website or downloads or emails or stuff like that. Further more, I don't want to have to educate anyone who is going to use one of my computers about these things either. I want to be able to trust that when a PC is connected to the net, it will be fine, and useful and robust. Much like a Mac I suppose.... But I don't appreciate the price tag attached to the ol' apple. If you get what you pay for, I expect a whole lot more than just being able to to a 'few' more things like video editing and playing DVD's like you can on a Mac..... What's that? You can do those things on Linux as well??? Well damn! :)
#14 Well...
...bending to monopoly and proprietary lock-in is hardly a solution. In the end you end up propagating the monopoly and proprietary lock-in perpetually.
All of the 'problems' you've mentioned above are the results of proprietary lock-in preventing the use of open standards to facilitate data exchange/manipulation. You can hardly blame GNU/Linux for lack of tools in editing software if target formats are legally encumbered both, from a hacking perspective AND from a usage perspective.
Simillarly, you can hardly blame any GNU/Linux distribution for lack of multimedia support if said multimedia formats come with legal encumberances in the form of patents.
You can't really fault GNU/Linux when using open standards based software - be that multimedia software or image processing software or document creation/layout software.
So if you are completely amenable to keeping YOUR data locked up in whatever proprietary, legally encumbered format, YOU are free to flush YOUR money down the drain.
Just don't expect everybody else to be as unconcerned as YOU are about YOUR own data.
#15 Vista is as Vista does...
I agree that really two things need to happen before Linux really has a chance to grab more market share.
However, I really think once the user is on the desktop...they find that except for some nuances in shortcut keys or mouse left/right clicks...Windows, Linux, and the Mac basically function the same way.
You mention a lot about XP, but I think the problem though is Vista. Vista is really forcing people to look at alternatives. Windows may be the standard, but very few people I talk to in a place of business really wants to see Vista become that next standard. For those of us that work in a mix of Unix/Linux/Windows and have banned Macs in the workplace...we're sort of wondering why we've been so loyal to Microsoft.
In my organization we have basically RHEL on the operational side of the house and Windows on the administrative side. If I'm going to need to retool for Vista, but I find that people are comfortable enough with Linux...why not go all Linux? If there are folks on the administrative side that need to run more professional software not compatible with Linux...why not just give those few a Mac? In the long run I'm likely to find it easier (just from the command line alone) to work in a Mac/Linux environment then a Windows/Linux environment.
Microsoft has some real problems with Vista...and in the end us Windows users have some serious choices to make. As I'm using Vista as I write this, I don't give this opinion lightly.
#16 You've forgotten one tiny, little detail...
#17 Averatec notebooks
I have two Averatec 3250 notebooks. One is running PCLinuxOS 2007 and is an absolute pleasure to use. The other is a dual boot XP and Xandros Linux unit. Anytime I run Linux on either machine, response time is fast and predictable. I do lots of surfing on them, and unlike the XP experience where the more you surf the slower the system gets, there is a consistency to the Linux perfomance that I don't have with XP.
I have run Ubuntu and Kubuntu on the systems and found that only up to versions 6.10 worked well. 7.04 and 7.10 had problems connecting or staying connected to a wireless signal.
The Xandros system does not have the required video driver (I've never looked for it) so i run it in safe video mode, and it runs just fine.
Of all of the distributions I have tried, I am most impressed by PCLinuxOS on the Averatec.
#18 ubuntu
I'm using ubuntu 7.10 for 3 months, all works fine. But there is a one "minus" of Linux desktop -- linux doesn't have many games...
Janet Kellman, software reviews editor
#19 Suse on Thinkpad
Two years ago I installed Suse 10.0 on an older IBM Thinkpad. This did not work well. I had no sound. USB was not recognized and very hard to connect with WLAN. So I put Windows XP on it and it runs fine.
I am not sure, if I should try again with Linux, this time with Ubuntu. But I am not eager to makes changes in kernel.