HP Releases Linux-Based Notebook

SteamyMobile writes "As the article says, 'In a sign the Linux operating system may be gaining traction beyond server and other back-room systems, HP said Tuesday it will be the first major PC maker to ship a business notebook computer pre-installed' with Linux. This is great news because, as anyone who has ever tried to run Linux (or even Windows XP) on a laptop knows, laptops come with all kinds of funky hardware, and it's often a mess trying to find and configure the right kernel modules to make things like software suspend work correctly. Having it shipped pre-loaded, and with support, makes it easy for me to decide where I'm getting my next laptop. Linux has been ready for the desktop for a while now, but it is good to see companies like HP acknowledging that."

linux-laptop!

[Goeland86]

Linux isn't only ready for the desktop, it's ready for the laptop too!!! And I also have an HP laptop which I'm happy about, where gentoo runs without any trouble on "standard" laptop parts. Only tricky bit was getting the DRI to work with the radeon mobility u1, but even that was easy. Go HP!

Ahhhhh....One Second Please

[darth_MALL]

Is it really a selling point selling a laptop pre-installed with Linux because it's such a challenge otherwise? What happens when it comes time for my annual reinstall? Not a real bargain if you ask me. You know this unit will be simplified to the point of removing the learning curve for Linux, and so it will be sold to novices who will be in the dumper when it comes time to fix the wear and tear. Just my 2 cents.

hp laptops

[grahagre]

lots of people bitch and complain aboout the quality of hp laptops, i think theyre great. personally i would have thought ibm would be the first major laptop maker to embrace linux pre-loaded, oh well hp is going to make a lot of money from this. thanks hp.

Huh?

[Greg Larkin]

From the article:

Fink said the launch is a test "so that we can see the take up we get for this particular product."

Soooo.... if the "take up" is insufficient, then the test failed? Where is the customer left in that case?

Re:Ahhhhh....One Second Please

[darth_MALL]

I'm not talking about a cost/licensing issue. You know this will fall into the hands of numerous Joe-User types who will not be prepared for the relative difficulty of a new OS. It's damned easy to make it function like the usual (read:Win) OS until it blows up. Then where is the user left? Easy Street? No.

Worth the price for Wireless

[miyako]

From the looks at it, the price is work it just for having wireless configured. It's a real PITA.
This does look really nice though, and I'm glad to see that they are using Suse, which seems to be the best "User Oriented" distrobution out there. I'm actually a little suprised that they can make a notebook no more expensive than it is with all supported hardware, as I've noticed Linux compatible hardware tends to be a wee bit more expensive than non-supported hardware.
I do have two concerns though, first off is the quality of the notebook. OS aside, if the hardware isn't robust enough to stand up to lots of abuse, then it won't sell well and someone will probably blame that on Linux. The second concern I have is that while Suse Professional is wonderful, the personal edition seems to really lack some important things (like a compiler. I don't care if your not a developer, if your using linux at some point you will want to install software that has to be compiled for your system).

Good. Linux laptop. I am SO there.

[Anonymous Coward]

"All of those parts of this notebook have been turned on, work completely and are fully supported," he said. (from the article)

I love this. I have a Gateway 400vtx. Works, the damn video card is irritating and Gateway sucks.

But for 1140?

I AM THEIR. It's mine. I want it. It's mine.

For a long time I thought, who needs a laptop? The desktop is faster and cheaper.

But now that I have one? I use it more then my desktop.

Why? Because it's convienient. I like to sit down in the middle of the room with the laptop in front of me. With the front propted up on my crossed legs It's confortable for my hands, and I am around other people instead of stuck in the "computer room". I take it outside, I take to work. Take it on trips.

Nice.

My desktop is for gaming (that runs linux, too).

It's nothing wonderfull, but it's nice. I have a couple tv capture cards, so I stream TV to my laptop and record shows to watch at work in the background.

It's nice. And one that is sold brand new with Linux installed? Everything works out of the box?

No kernel patching no experimental drivers? Great. Plug n run. Keep my big media stuff on my old Desktop, now gaming rig/file server/media server/mythtv backend. Work gets done the on laptop.

(oh and if you think that "hey windows you don't have to patch". I prefer to expend effort getting something to work, rather then continiously fixing broken crap. Windows is the death of a thousand cuts.)

$60 difference...

[LostCluster]

The article points out that there's only a $60 difference between the Linux-equiped laptop and the comparable model from HP running Windows. Am I the only one who thinks that's exactly what HP is paying for their OEM licenses since they buy it bulk? (A Foogle search reveals that there are many web outlets who will gladly sell you an OEM Windows XP Home copy for about $80-$100, provided you also buy a piece of hardware at the same time to keep the transaction within Microsoft's rules.)

Re:Ahhhhh....One Second Please

[kfg]

What happens when it comes time for my annual reinstall?

You put in the 'rescue' disk and click on "Yes".

There, not so hard, is it?

Not that I've ever had to do a reinstall of Linux for maintenance purposes. It doesn't fragment, crud up or slow down and BonziBuddy doesn't run on it.

KFG

The acid test for linux on any laptop

[gabbarbhai]

Would be reliable suspend/resume to/from disk and memory, with all devices waking up correctly. I've heard that Powerbooks with Linux can do that, but I don't own one (yet)..

Re:Not sure what the article author is talking abo

[Standard Colin]

Absolutely true! I have Gentoo running on an iBook and it's a spectacular linux laptop. The only complaint I have is that theres no way to get graphics acceleration because the video card is a radeon mobility M6, for which there are no open source drivers, and the ATI binary drivers dont run on ppc. I believe PowerBooks have or have the option to use, and nVidia card. That would be nice

Convenience

[zaxios]

I expect this will be successful simply because of how enormously inconvenient it is for Linux users to buy a laptop bundled with WinXP and get a refund, or how expensive that OS is to just pay for and not use. However, if you don't like SuSE, there's always FreeDOS on a Dell [google.com.au] and installing the Linux distribution of your choice later. I guess this rules in the convenience stakes - as convenient as buying a WinXP laptop - and that's its selling point.

(Note that this certainly isn't the first [linuxjournal.com] popular Linux laptop.)

Re:A day late and a dollar short in my case.

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X has it's moments.

To say none of the trouble that's untrue. It's easy to deal with to be sure, but it's still not as flexible or as high performing as Linux on x86. (or PPC for that matter).

Personally the custom enviroment I make for myself thru X windows' infinate customizability is far better for MY purposes then anything I can get from OS X.

Also besides video drivers (nvidia) Linux is going to still be more stable. Finder still has some nasty lock-up habits. But it's not as bad as Windows, definately.

Re:HP makes good printers, nothing more.

[ejaw5]

If you ask me, HP printers have gotten worse then before when they were an "instruments" company instead of a consumer company. I have to wonder how many of the newer monochrome laser printers will serve as long as an old HPLaserJet 4. Just look at their inkjets. Used to be rock solid, now they break every two years. And don't get me started on them shrinking the ink cartridge sizes/capacity on the newer machines...

this is nice, but...

[CAIMLAS]

I know that I should be "grateful for what I have", but I've got a couple gripes about "linux on laptops". Keep in mind, however, that I own an IBM Thinkpad X30, and I do run single-boot debian sid on it.

1) IBM needs to get their act together and offer Linux support, at the very least, for their laptop line. Their hardware is mostly supported already, but it shouldn't be necessary for me to pay the extra amount for a licensed copy of Windows XP, which I'll never use just to get a well-built laptop. What's more, they're advertising linux for enterprise use, and enterprises use laptops. I don't see how moving to linux couldn't be anything but good for them now, overall - or at least moving in and helping linux laptop development, so that it is soon mature enough for IBM to start offering it at a corporate level on laptops.
2) It would be nice to start getting a little bit better kernel and X support for things like suspend and power ACPI. At the very least a listing somewhere on manufacturer's sites saying, "hey, our hardware needs this specific version of software to work properly if you run Linux" - it's often difficult to find definitive information on such topics, and people will often get things working when others are not able to for odd reasons. Personally, hard or soft suspend do not currently work for me w/ kernel 2.6 and X 4.3 running the dri-trunk debs - on current sid - on my X30. Returning from suspend results in X being borked, requiring a reboot to fix. (Anyone that has information as to why this is occuring, or what the fix might be, and I'd appreciate hearing from you...)
3) Wireless support. I'm not talking solely about drivers, as those have improved significantly* and are on the right road, but wireless tools for useland. As far as I know, it's currently fairly difficult (via waproamd, the only thing I've seen to do this) to get a wireless card to 'roam' from network to network as you go from, say, home or work. There needs to be a good userland tool for this.
4) * The wireless drivers in the kernel itself are still pretty shitty and minimal, and wlan-ng sucks horribly. The hostap 2.x drivers are a significant improvement over the other two in every regard (as far as I've seen), but actual support in the kernel really should be improved. :-/ (Anyone know why hostap stuff hasn't been brought into the main kernel tree?)
5) power management tools don't seem to work too well. It's quite possible that I'm simply ignorant on the matter, but tools such as cpudyn and cpufreqd do not scale the processor's speed dynamically when losing AC power, or gaining it again. In my experience, the daemons need to be restarted manually.

Linux Certified Stickers, SWEEEET :)

[metalac]

Well it seems like "Linux Certified" hardware is getting easier and easier to find. I bought a laptop about 2-3 years ago from Sony and it was a pain to get USB to work, I had to user the patch, but with successive kernel releasies it got acctually fixed in the kernel code and it started working straight out of box after kernel 2.4.22 or so.

Now that HP is getting their certified laptops out there I feel that rest of the manufacturers would also start geting their act together. After all people who buy these things and run Linux on them are probably the people who'll recomend these computers to their Joe Sixpack friends. I can't count how many times I recomended a computer or a piece of hardware based on how well it worked with Linux, just so to support the cause and support companies that acctually use standards and are not biased towards a certian OS.

Re:WTF? No Wireless or DVD+RW?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm typing this ON A HP NX5000, and it comes with a Atheros A/B/G wireless solution, not Intel. Also, it comes with the bad-assed Texas Instruments combo CardBus+1394a+FlashMedia controller. Reads/Writes SD cards faster than ANY media reader I have ever seen. Take my advice FWIW, NEVER buy a laptop with a Ricoh or O2MICRO part in it. Yeeech!

I go thru a laptop about every 6 months, and I can honestly say this is the best I have had yet. I've tried IBM, Sony and Dell, and would rate them in that order. Bluetooth, A/B/G, 1394, and a nice screen (get the 15" upgrade).

I should also mention that I'm using WinXP; Sorry SlashDot, XP works great for me.

Interesting...

[ErichTheWebGuy]

I heard [interex.org] that HP was officially suppoting Gnome (the link is 4 yrs old, and I haven't heard anything different. Please correct me if I'm wrong). So much for that! SuSE's support of Gnome is spotty at best. In fact, in the default install of 9.1 Personal (ISO download version) Gnome isnt installed at all. That's really too bad. I saw the screenshots from the previous slashdot article [slashdot.org], Gnome 2.8 is looking pretty damn good!

Linux is NOT ready for the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux has been ready for the desktop for a while now, but it is good to see companies like HP acknowledging that.

What are you smoking? Linux is ready for the desktop like windows 2 was ready for the desktop. Its clunky to configure, has issues with even common hardware (many manufacturers still refuse to ship Linux drivers), comes with an RTFM mentality for support, and requires you to fiddle with initialization scripts. What's more open office is a poor replacement for MS Office, and the same is true where there are apps to replace the industry standard.

Linux is NOT ready for the desktop. We need to wake up to this and grow up. We have to stop patting ourselves on the back for the "good enough" lookie what we did for free operating system (and if you don't like it you're stupid). What's more you can't goof off and play as many games on it as on windows.

If Linux was ready for average the desktop user, people would be making the switch in droves. New users and children would never touch windows. The proof is simple - this HP computer shipping with Linux supported is the exception not the rule.

We need to do MUCH MUCH better!!!

Mod me how you want but you know its true.

Re:Ahhhhh....One Second Please

[Harry8]

I'll buy one as soon as it's available over here.
Why.
Becuase is linux is already installed on the beast by the vendor, all the hardware will just work(tm).
I can buy it and get on with being productive with it, rather than spending a lot of time getting it all configured, installing kernel modules etc only to discover that some vendor has claimed to ship a particular piece of hardware, but has in fact shipped something else which they have renamed. Eg Dell shipped me a SoundBlaster Live! in a desktop that had been butchered so it wouldn't work with Linux. Waste of money, or if I send it back a waste of time & hastle, (which is also money.)
If it works out of the box, there's a good chance that upgrades will work.
I'd be happy with a Laptop with no OS installed that the vendor assures contains linux supported hardware. Having an OS installed is just a really great statement to re-inforce the fact that "this is Linux compatible and no we aren't kidding."
Loving HP's work on this.
Anyone got a link to the online store? Seriously.

Re:Worth the price for Wireless

[kbielefe]

About a year ago, my wife tripped over my HP laptop cord and knocked it off of the table. The hard drive crashed hard enough to make tinkling noises. Mind you this was at least the third time it had a fall like that. I took out the (IBM) hard drive, popped in a standard Knoppix disk, and have been using that ever since. I'm typing this right now on that laptop over an 802.11g connection that takes me less than 30 seconds to configure with a nice gui every time I boot up. It has connected by default before to my neighbor's unsecured wireless router without having to do anything.

This laptop definitely runs Linux well and is definitely hardy enough to withstand some abuse. When it finally does give out you can bet I will be replacing it with one of HP's preinstalled Linux laptops.

Documentation?

[Shoten]

I had a linux laptop from Dell (no, HP isn't really the first to do this) once, and it worked decently well, given a few crappy things. One, they had made it impossible to change the desktop background permanently...until you figured out that they'd cut back the rights on the config file (I forget which one) to prevent you from writing to it, even as root. And when I had to reinstall RedHat, suspend didn't work. There was apparently a very specific setting needed to get it working again, which Dell knew about, but it really would have been nice if they'd shared the knowledge they developed in setting the laptops up, so that it didn't revert to the same old problem as any other laptop as soon as a reinstall was needed.

Re:Worth the price for Wireless

[aussersterne]

From the looks at it, the price is work it just for having wireless configured. It's a real PITA.

Linux distros are getting really good at supporting wireless, actually. Just make sure that your wireless card is supported by the kernel.

I got a Cisco card (uses the airo driver), and Fedora Core 2 works with it just fine. To configure the WEP, I just chose "Network Configuration" from the "System Settings" menu (it's in both the GNOME and K menus, depending on your desktop preference).

Up pops a GUI tool where you can enter an SSID or choose "auto" and where you can select key length and enter a WEP key. Entered it, clicked Apply, and voila, I was up and running with my wireless network.

All GUI tools, no hardware/driver issues, to a 128-bit WEP network.

Re:Good News Bad News

[MrRuslan]

heh good one...but I just got a new hp ze4545 and an extra 256 MB of ram to make it 512...It;s and VERY nice machine ...they make good notebooks for the money...i payed just a little over a grand and I can play need for speed underground on my laptop with no problem...on low settings of corse...I could not find a better notebook for the money and now that they are doing thise im even more happy i got it...suse 9.1 runs great on it btw :)

Re:A day late and a dollar short in my case.

[bigberk]

I think OS X is really going places. If I could afford a laptop, I would get an Apple [apple.com]. If you look at what Apple is selling, I think it's a very attractive mix for professionals in IT. I'm not just talking laptops here.

• The platform is computationally powerful. This is why the multimedia people adore Macs, but for the same reasons the Engineering/IT community is showing more interest. Our university's new G5 lab blows away all other equipment we use for CAD and modeling.
• The computers function well. The interface is flexible and powerful; the system stays together, rather than falling apart.
• OS X, based on BSD, is pretty much a *NIX environment. This is the important point that people still haven't caught on to! You can compile and use all kinds of Linux/UNIX software. You have all the basic tools. The UNIX basis brings a new flexibility.
• Macs are pervasive enough that any software you would want to use is available. Because of OS X (the UNIX direction), much more software is rapidly becoming available too.

Is this the same HP that...

[Long-EZ]

Is this the same HP that 19 months ago told me that not only would they not sell me a notebook PC without Windows, if I uninstalled WinXP I would void my HARDWARE warranty? I bought the notebook anyway, because their policies at the time were the least offensive. I installed Xandros Linux [xandros.com] without ever booting WinXP. Anyone want some unused XP OEM CDs with an unused certificate of authenticity?. No problems running Xandros, and even the Radeon chipset works 100% with a minor tweak. Linux is definitely ready for the desktop, and even the notebook.

Next time, I'm leaning toward a nice IBM notebook, mostly because they've been standup guys lately where Linux is concerned, and HP CEO Carly Fiorina has been making a lot of noise about DMCA crap on all HP products. Just how the hell are they going to lock up a Linux notebook with DRM?

I'm glad that HP is shipping a Linux notebook PC, but this isn't some corporate altruism. The only reason for an HP Linux notebook is they see the writing on the wall and don't want to follow the next wave. You know, the big wave, where Linux sweeps over the entire planet?

I'm disappointed it's not Debian based

[mdfst13]

"glad to see that they are using Suse"

I'm disappointed that it isn't Debian. IIRC, HP has a representative on the Debian Desktop project. The worst part of working with Debian is the install and hardware configuration (both of which would be done for you here; just add a recovery disk and a few CDs as a local apt-get repository and off you go).

I would seriously consider a preinstalled basic Debian for a dual boot system with XP Pro. With Suse, I would just get XP Pro and add Suse afterwards...the preinstall isn't as helpful.

Debian is also free beer, which would allow the price to be lower than its MS Windows equivalent.

OT: HP printers

[odie_q]

HP have never built their own printers, they're rebadged Canon parts. You're right though, the laserjet 4's and 5's are so much more reliable than the 4100's (or *shudder* the 4050's) or 5100's that it's hard to believe it's the same brand.

I've worked with monochrome HP laser printers since laserjet II, and I would say they peaked around LJ4 or LJ5. The new ones are pretty much crap in comparison.

Good news, but ...

[jopet]

They should make this offer in Europe too - it seems the number of people using Linux is even bigger here. I also think it is a shame that self-pronounced Linux supporter IBM still does not do this and still only offers (even "recommends") Microsoft products for their laptops (though I am running various versions of Suse Linux on various IBM Thinkpads now for years). It is really about time that hardware vendors stop forcing us to buy something that at least some will only throw away and replace by something else.

Re:But can I...

[gnu-generation-one]

"But can I get one without linux pre installed?"

Quote from the top of every HP hardware page, in big bold letters:
"HP recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional"