Re: Centrino support

From: Jan Rychter
Date: Sun Aug 17 2003 - 14:13:33 EST


>>>>> "Bryan" == Bryan O'Sullivan <bos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Bryan> On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 13:35, Jan Rychter wrote:
>> I keep dreaming about the day when I'll be able to have a modern
>> laptop with a stable Linux kernel. As for now, it has taken me (on
>> one of my laptops) about 1.5 years to get to a point where 2.4
>> works, most of my hardware works, and software suspend (pretty much
>> a requirement for laptops) works. I'm not about to give that up
>> easily, so I'm not that eager to jump to 2.5/2.6.

Bryan> Can't say that's been my experience. I bought a new Thinkpad
Bryan> X31 the other day, and it's already running 2.6.0-test3.
Bryan> Suspend works, all's happy.

Lucky you! That's because almost two years (or so) of heavy work by many
people went into this. Also, you're probably lucky with your Thinkpad.

When I bought this laptop (a Sharp Mebius PC-MT1-H5) back in Sept 2001,
there weren't many machines on the market that had only ACPI (and no
APM). And Linux ACPI wasn't in a very sane state back then, not to
mention swsusp. It took almost two years for the software to mature, and
only recently did I get a stable machine that I can work on for a month
without rebooting (suspending/resuming several times a day).

I've just gotten a Centrino-based Toshiba Dynabook SS S7/290LNKW, and
the story continues -- I've already hit at least two ACPI bugs, while
swsusp problems seem to have been ironed out thanks to hard work by
Nigel Cunningham. And of course, the built-in wireless card does not
work. My guess is another 6 months (if not more) until Linux works on
it.

--J.

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