Submitted by j.a.watson on February 24, 2009 - 6:55am
I have installed 8.0 on all three of my laptops, and I am pleased and impressed.
HP 2133 Mini-Note: This little gem is the best of the bunch, and it seems as though I like it more every day. The final 8.0 release is even better on it than RC3 was, because of a couple of small nits have been fixed. It now installs smoothly and runs extremely well. As with RC3, the initial installation configures X to use the vesa driver at 1280x800, which is at least usable and acceptable, although not really "right". I once again copied over the latest openchrome drivers and edited xorg.conf to use them, and it then came up exactly right at 1280x768. Beyond that, everything seems to work fine right out of the box. The broadcom wireless interface even sees and connects to both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks from my Netcom and Linksys routers. I've just seen another price drop on the HP 2133 here in Switzerland, it's down to 350 Swiss Francs with SuSE Enterprise preloaded. At that price, this is an unbeatable little netbook.
Fujisu Lifebook S6510: Installed easily, but there are a couple of problems. The audio doesn't work, and I haven't figured out why yet. I've tried the suggestions in the tips and forums, so far to no avail. I'm sure it's no big thing, I'll figure it out when I have time. The wireless interface doesn't seem to work either, but that is at least partly my own fault. I swapped out the Intel 4965 card for an Intel 5300 a while back, and although that works with everything else I have tried, if I can't get it working with MEPIS I might just swap back the 4965 because I didn't get the benefit I wanted from the 5300 anyway. Other than these two things, MEPIS is working great on the S6510. It handles the laptop and external displays just fine, and gets the resolution right on both of them.
Fujitsu-Siemens S2110: Installed ok, but still has the problem with no Swiss German keyboard listed in the initial installation selection. Once the installation is done and it's up and running, I can fix that no problem. I also had to change the setting in the MEPIS Network Assistant to enable the Broadcom 4401 wired ethernet adapter, as before. The Atheros wireless adapter worked just fine from the start, again at both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. I was particularly pleased and impressed that the ATI Radeon 200M graphic adapter was no problem.
The bottom line here is, I can (and do) certainly recommend MEPIS 8.0 for laptop use. I expect that I will be setting up several HP 2133s with it for my friends in the near future.
jw 24/2/2009
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Comments
Dell Latitude CPx
by rich_c - Mar 2 2009 - 5:34pm
Mepis 8 is great on Laptops, assuming you don't have to pull every trick you can think of to get it to install and display a GUI login! I posted on Mepislovers regarding my difficult install experience over last weekend. Suffice to say, for some reason the stock xorg.conf did not want to play ball. The effort was worth it though. Once the initial potentially show stopping issue was overcome, everything else just worked!
Bowlkook on Mepislovers