(Continued from Highway to Dell, part three.) Before buying the Dell Inspiron1525 I did some research and I found a thread about PPP problems with Ubuntu on the machine. I sent a PM to the author of the post and asked of his/her experiences. I got this reply (quoted with permission):
I am no longer using Ubuntu 7.10 on this notebook. I converted to Fedora 8, have not yet returned, and do not plan to until the 8.04 release. Fedora functions beautifully in an unprecedented manner. My primary issue with Ubuntu was power management, which is a complete wreck. The screen saver, for example, would activate only sporadically. To no surprise, hibernation and sleep never functioned, and I would lose sessions consistently upon reactivation. Not that this situation is unique, but, on the other hand, Fedora 8 has managed to execute power management flawlessly and I have maintained highly stable uptimes of up to two weeks. I would highly recommend its installation on this particular model, as I have experienced virtually no drawbacks.
Ubuntu works fine for me, but if you can’t get Ubuntu to work properly it sounds like you might want to try Fedora!
Update Continued on Highway to Dell, part five.
Also, I couldn’t get the 64bit version of ubuntu to install – and I thought the processor was 64bit!
//processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLA4E
(has a kernel panic when booting from CD)
Any ideas?
ps. when posting comments it just shows a blank page as response – hope this gets through.
Have you heard from the Fedora guy if he has switched to Ubuntu 8 yet? I am also concerned about power management.
Currently I’m running Ubuntu 8.04 on Dell 1525. Everything seems good with the standard ubuntu 32 bit distribution. Hibernate and suspend work 99% of the time but I use the laptop on the train, and the battery life seems to be decreasing slightly every week. I’m still getting about 2 hours out of it though. And I am hibernating/resuming at least once per trip.
I had Ubuntu 7 on a previous laptop, and a I noticed the battery go down rapidly after switching from windows to ubuntu 7. After a couple of months, the battery was dead. Never really knew if it was ubuntu/linux or just the battery – it would have been close to 4 years old at the time.
If fedora 8 has better power management than ubuntu 8 then I think I’ll switch – I don’t need another dead battery! Maybe I’ll install both and give it a try.
continued…
I do need to go through powertop again, and check if the settings are still optimal.
I’ve also added some unecessary software to my ubuntu installation, so I should really reinstall (I wanted to try out KDE4 and gdesklets). Perhaps that is causing more battery drain.
Thanks for posting your experiences – I’ve been meaning to but haven’t had time yet.
I got around the posting a comment problem (blank response) – I think it didn’t like the link I had to powertop:
Here it is without the http
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerTOP