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#1 2004-05-22 10:49:22

fragilek
Member
From: UK
Registered: 2004-04-03
Posts: 31

Is Arch laptop friendly?

A friend of mine, who incidently read about Arch in Linux Format wink, had problems installing Arch on his laptop. Apparantly it pauses for ages when coming to install the packages. I don't know the technicalities of the situation, but will Arch run on a bulk standard laptop?

Cheers


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#2 2004-05-22 11:07:22

zeppelin
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From: Athens, Greece
Registered: 2004-03-05
Posts: 807
Website

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

I'm not sure what you mean it pauses.
I had the same impression [installation could be better in this part].
your friend should WAIT for a while [could be 5 minutes]..
then pacman<?> will start installing each package.
Your friend (as I) must have chosen to do a full install so I think pacman checks integrity (md5sum) for all the packages that are on the CD [and that takes a long long time sometimes]..

a warning in the installer, that would say:
"Please wait a bit, installer will check integrity of pkgs in the CD"
is so much needed..

and hey, I was coming from SlackWare tongue {that means this should not be seen as "oh if you're an expert you guess<?> this.."

that's all and hope that is the 'problem' your friend has

ok you can also search the net about boot params for his laptop

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#3 2004-05-22 11:29:05

Zym0tiC
Member
Registered: 2004-01-17
Posts: 40
Website

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

I'm running Arch on my HP xe4500 without any problems. I had some problems when I tried to install RH9 a couple of months ago. I had to pass some boot parameters otherwise I couldn't get into the installer.

Best thing is to get some more information and search the internet for any problems. That did the trick for me smile

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#4 2004-05-22 13:05:09

wdemoss
Member
From: WV - USA
Registered: 2004-01-18
Posts: 222

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

runing arch on a dell latitude D800 with Pentium M and 15.4 inch ultra wide screan. I had no problems installing. I only install the base packages when I install, so installation was sooooooo fast, from starting it (booting the install cd) to end (rebooting into freshly installed system) it took maybe 20 minutes.

-wd


Hobbes : Shouldn't we read the instructions?
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#5 2004-05-25 00:04:09

tehdely
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Registered: 2004-02-20
Posts: 148
Website

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

I run Arch on an ancient Toshiba Satellite 4010CDS (Pentium II 266 kru :woot: )

It's nice and fast.  No Linux distro has approached the laptop usability of Arch, at least for me big_smile


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#6 2004-05-25 02:34:11

kakabaratruskia
Member
From: Santiago, Chile
Registered: 2003-08-24
Posts: 596

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

I think the package install stage in arch is slow, as it has to check for trouble and configure everything. Maybe it should have something moving (like a progress bar, or any "live" symbol), so that you know it has not crashed.


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They're all resting down in Cornwall
writing up their memoirs for a paper-back edition
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#7 2004-05-25 08:18:05

zeppelin
Member
From: Athens, Greece
Registered: 2004-03-05
Posts: 807
Website

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

kakabaratruskia wrote:

I think the package install stage in arch is slow, as it has to check for trouble and configure everything. Maybe it should have something moving (like a progress bar, or any "live" symbol), so that you know it has not crashed.

either this, or a note that will say:
"ok now "sit back an relax as Setup checks the integrity of the chosen packages, beforing installing them. This may take some minutes" (Gates' Moto)

ok as I would put it:
"checking the integrity of the chosen packages beforing installing them. [no it hasn't crashed] tongue"

hope to see this in 0.7

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#8 2005-08-03 00:12:29

Mr.Elendig
#archlinux@freenode channel op
From: The intertubes
Registered: 2004-11-07
Posts: 4,092

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

if you go to vt5 it gives you the output of almost everything the installer does.

It's mutch more intresting to watch pacman dl'ing packages, than to look at a screen that says it's dl'ing.

(specialy since my cd for some strange reason got the "ILoveCandy" option enabled for pacman)

edit: oh, and this has helped me solving some problems. Like once when pacman was just sitting there, telling me that it was making a fs on the harddrive. for 5 hours. (I put the installer on, and went off to do soething else)
when I hit alt-F5 there was a nice friendly message that there was a problem with the partion, and it showed a way to fix it.


Evil #archlinux@libera.chat channel op and general support dude.
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#9 2005-08-03 00:42:12

zeppelin
Member
From: Athens, Greece
Registered: 2004-03-05
Posts: 807
Website

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

so an easy fix is to have a string to say:

verbose output of what is going on in Alt+F5

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#10 2005-08-03 08:24:30

dtw
Forum Fellow
From: UK
Registered: 2004-08-03
Posts: 4,439
Website

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

Hmmm  - what's this?  A year and six months late?

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#11 2005-08-10 08:33:47

nesrecar
Member
From: Germany/Munich
Registered: 2004-06-06
Posts: 79

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

I used Arch on an Acer Travelmate 804LCI and actually on an IBM R51. No problems, can't acknowledge with you fragilek. :-)


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#12 2005-08-10 12:05:42

Greycloack
Member
Registered: 2004-03-05
Posts: 166

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

I'm running it on a Gateway 200X...
the only thing I have problem with is the battery status... I didn't manage to configure acpi to read it...
but I didn't work very hard on it as well

Besides that - Runs like a charm and flawless install

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#13 2005-08-11 07:19:09

Moo-Crumpus
Member
From: Hessen / Germany
Registered: 2003-12-01
Posts: 1,487

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

it is as much as linux is.


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#14 2005-08-17 15:40:12

LB06
Member
From: The Netherlands
Registered: 2003-10-29
Posts: 435

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

Being 'laptop friendly' mainly depends on the hardware support. And HW support mainly depends on the (Linux) kernel. So this should be the same for almost every recent distro on earth smile

But Arch certainly does make life (with Linux) somewhat easier. Arch has, for example, prepackaged the kernel modules for the wireless Intel cards, synaptics touchpad, nvidia/ati cards, etc.

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#15 2005-09-09 08:51:32

scrooge
Member
Registered: 2005-02-24
Posts: 23

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

Working like a charme on my Acer TravelMate 613TXV  yikes

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#16 2005-09-09 16:11:41

big_gie
Member
Registered: 2005-01-19
Posts: 637

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

Working great on a Dell Inspiron 8500.
The wifi card (Dell TrueModile 1300), based on a broadcom chip, needs ndiswrapper, which works great.
I've tryed once the (win)modem and I didn't figured how to set it but I've always used adsl/lan for internet, as most people do.

I've managed to suspend it using 2.6.13 but not with nvidia driver. Only the open source "nv".

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#17 2005-09-09 23:38:08

MrCoul
Member
From: Alabama
Registered: 2005-09-09
Posts: 10

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

I'm a sware dev, working from home. A disaster with my machine meant I needed a replacement ASAP so I ended up in Comp-USA (Sorry no-US people).

I ended up with a HP ( I swore once I'd never buy such ). It's a Pavillion ZD7000 and works fine.

Some of the hardware is unusable ( the media "drive" especially ). And for wireless, you end up with ndiswrapper ( thanks broadcom! ).

But it's a pretty comptent PC ( I play Games under XP unfortunately ), okay power usage etc. and at least the video is NVIDIA which is a big linux plus.

Even better, it has the best "how-to-make-things-work-on-linux" on-line resource I've found yet for a machine

http://www.zd7000forums.com

Works well for me.

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#18 2006-02-11 21:25:41

dpc
Member
Registered: 2005-10-16
Posts: 103

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

Working fine on TravelMate 244FX.

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#19 2006-03-08 22:32:23

wrj
Member
Registered: 2006-02-21
Posts: 17

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

Works well on an older Dell Latitude here.


-w

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#20 2006-03-08 23:22:31

raskolnikov
Member
From: France
Registered: 2006-01-08
Posts: 100

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

Works perfectly on Acer 1355 here (only need a non-SMP kernel to load powernow-k7 and gain frequency scaling, but that's not a big deal).


Excessive showering, grooming, and toothbrushing is not only vain, it wastes valuable coding time.

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#21 2006-03-09 00:20:35

_Gandalf_
Member
Registered: 2006-01-12
Posts: 735

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

Works Great here too, HP Pavilion dv1071ea
though TI MMC/SD card reader don't work, damn TI

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#22 2006-03-09 01:45:06

slubman
Member
From: Grenoble (France)
Registered: 2004-08-04
Posts: 86
Website

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

Works how i want on my Asus A6KQ30 (A6000 series) after "blacklisted" uhcd-hcd and ehci-hcd in order to bypass an udev freeze.
The MMC/SMC card reader doesn't work, and i've not tested the webcam.

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#23 2006-03-09 15:38:36

iggy
Member
From: Germany, L.E. - Leipzig
Registered: 2004-10-17
Posts: 367

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

everything works great on my ASUS A3521NBH, except the cardreader. i can use fn-buttons, opengl (i855gm), acpi...  tongue


sorry for my bad english smile

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#24 2006-03-09 17:17:18

shamrok
Member
From: Poland, Kraków
Registered: 2006-02-20
Posts: 61

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

On  my HP Compaq nx6110 everything works fine (I have not tested modem and suspend2disk). Also I have found this howto for nx6110 on Arch:
http://www.4momo.de/artikel__show_db__other__123.htm

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#25 2006-03-09 17:34:32

lessthanjake
Member
From: Norway
Registered: 2005-11-09
Posts: 319
Website

Re: Is Arch laptop friendly?

I think Arch is great for new laptops, since it got archck in repo, which ships with the latest acpi-patches. acpi is often a show-stopper, it was for me, but archck saved me smile

ps: my laptop is Fujitsu Siemens P7120, and it now works like a charm!!

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