Linux laptops the final hurdle

I run Linux on my laptop. I am quite proud of this feat because it is something that took an outrageously long time to achieve, and for at least a few weeks after I got Linux working, I walked around with a permanent grin on my face.

The better part of a year down the line, however, and the grin has faded substantially, even if the trauma of getting everything working properly may never be erased from my mind.

Laptops are a completely different ballgame and involve a whole new set of skills.

Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb

Installing Linux on a laptop is, in most cases, a subtle art involving a lot of fiddling and a substantial deal of patience. It`s just not good enough to bang in a CD-ROM and hope for the best. And no matter how many times you`ve installed Linux on a desktop machine, you`re never quite prepared for the steep learning curve ahead when you first try Linux on a laptop.

Linux was clearly originally built to support standard desktop hardware and thanks to the marketing weight most big companies throw behind their hardware, the market is fairly standard, making desktop Linux something of a pleasure these days. Laptops are, however, a completely different ballgame and involve a whole new set of skills.

For a start there are PCMCIA cards, a notoriously boggy area when it comes to Linux. The biggest problem with these is usually that whatever PCMCIA card you have, it is almost undoubtedly what is known as a "winmodem". Winmodems rely on software on the Windows platform to make them work, unlike a standard standalone 56K modem that most desktops use. To all purposes, a winmodem is all but useless to a Linux laptop unless you have the time and patience to trawl the Internet for drivers and instructions to get your particular brand going.

Most users have their own preferences when it comes to PCMCIA cards but I have most success with the 3Com cards. 3Com provides drivers for most of its cards on its site and for those that aren`t supported, the PCMCIA site at SourceForge is particularly useful. The SourceForge PCMCIA site (http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/) has links to drivers for most cards as well as an extensive database of known cards that are and are not supported by Linux.

Once you`ve got the modem or network card to work on your laptop, the next issue is to get a working X display. Admittedly the process has become a lot easier over the past six months, but it can still be a trying experience.

If you have a budget laptop (if there is still such an item) you`re probably stuck with something like the on-board graphics adaptor that came with mine. In my case it is something called a Trident Cyberblade, a card vastly under-powered and despite claimed support, it needs a ton of tweaking to get it up and running.

Unfortunately, there are many cheaper laptops around with this card, which makes for a lot of frustrated people. I know that new versions of Mandrake pick up the card pretty well, but most other distributions just choke on this step, which means a lot of hand-tweaking to get it going.

If even this doesn`t work, there is always the framebuffer driver. Using the framebuffer driver most laptops will display a working desktop, although it is slow, and also plays havoc with fonts and graphics at the best of times.

In my ongoing search for help on installing Linux on a laptop, one of the best sites I happened upon was the aptly named www.linux-on-laptops.com. The site is plain and simple in design but is home to an enormous amount of information. Most of the information comes from people who have successfully installed Linux on a range of laptop hardware.

Although Linux is a lot better on laptops than a few months ago, it is always a good idea to arm yourself with a complete specification list of your desired machine as well as a recent copy of the Linux hardware compatibility list available from www.linux.org.