Is anyone running CentOS on a newish Thinkpad?
I have been using Linux as my primary workstation since about 97 and it seems like using Linux as a desktop has slipped over the years. After the Gnome desktop dumb-down, I have been nursing CentOS 6.8 on a 5 yo Toshiba. So I was hoping that someone has some recent real-world experience with new Thinkpads.
So is anyone running a new Thinkpad? What model? Any problems with wireless or suspend or the touchpad?
It seems optical drives are gone. Do I boot the iso from USB or what's the procedure now?
Generally seeking new laptop advice. If Lenovo is not good is anyone using Toshiba?
Mike
On 9/29/2016 5:55 PM, Michael B Allen wrote:
It seems optical drives are gone. Do I boot the iso from USB or what's the procedure now?
yup, put iso on USB, go to town.
Generally seeking new laptop advice. If Lenovo is not good is anyone using Toshiba?
I have not much cared for Lenovo since IBM sold out to them. I've been generally quite happy with business grade ('Latitude') Dell laptops... my wife's got an XPS15 (running Windows) thats very nice, gorgeous IPS 1920x1080 screen, very slim, nicely made, and her new work laptop is a Latitude 5500-something thats also a really nice super-slim thing, has monster battery life, and all the latest USB C and so forth, but it too is running Windows 7 as thats what she needs for her techwriter job (Adobe Framemaker on Linux is very poorly supported).
John R Pierce wrote:
I have not much cared for Lenovo since IBM sold out to them.
I haven't noticed any change in quality at all. I guess the IBM laptops were always manufactured in China anyway. There seem to be more problems running CentOS and Fedora on new laptops, but that lies in the hands of CentOS/Fedora.
I have had good experiences with Lenovo, and I was IBM before, the quality was passed over, even the phones are good.
One thing is they kept the Idea's of a solid machine, did not do a cheap copy, They purchased a good product and kept it up from my experience, The Acer I use at times has spacing issues between the screen and the keyboard when closed and over time it scratches the screen, and other issues, Acer better than most, but as in all they need a little love and care.
Regards Michael Cole
On Friday, September 30, 2016 11:13:59 AM Timothy Murphy wrote:
John R Pierce wrote:
I have not much cared for Lenovo since IBM sold out to them.
I haven't noticed any change in quality at all. I guess the IBM laptops were always manufactured in China anyway. There seem to be more problems running CentOS and Fedora on new laptops, but that lies in the hands of CentOS/Fedora.
Another 2 cents if you want it --
No Lenovo laptop experiences; only deployed some refurb desktop models --- all work well with CentOS/Fedora.
I've deployed several AMD-based Toshibas over the last 2 years and think they're a good value. I've read many criticisms of their build and components quality but I've had good experiences with several different models. The battery life is average on the AMD based models. I usually pull the factory hard drive and replace it with a crucial M200 SSD.
Also deployed several Dell Inspiron 5000 and 7000 models over the last 3 years and found them reliable and good performers. I purchase refurbs, install an SSD and an updated CentOS or Fedora. Good battery life, no hardware driver problems, nice HD 1920x1080 screens, external USB devices work well.
On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 8:55 PM, Michael B Allen ioplex@gmail.com wrote:
Is anyone running CentOS on a newish Thinkpad?
I have been using Linux as my primary workstation since about 97 and it seems like using Linux as a desktop has slipped over the years. After the Gnome desktop dumb-down, I have been nursing CentOS 6.8 on a 5 yo Toshiba. So I was hoping that someone has some recent real-world experience with new Thinkpads.
So is anyone running a new Thinkpad? What model? Any problems with wireless or suspend or the touchpad?
It seems optical drives are gone. Do I boot the iso from USB or what's the procedure now?
Generally seeking new laptop advice. If Lenovo is not good is anyone using Toshiba?
Mike _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On 09/29/2016 08:55 PM, Michael B Allen wrote:
Is anyone running CentOS on a newish Thinkpad?
I have been using Linux as my primary workstation since about 97 and it seems like using Linux as a desktop has slipped over the years. After the Gnome desktop dumb-down, I have been nursing CentOS 6.8 on a 5 yo Toshiba. So I was hoping that someone has some recent real-world experience with new Thinkpads.
So is anyone running a new Thinkpad? What model? Any problems with wireless or suspend or the touchpad?
It seems optical drives are gone. Do I boot the iso from USB or what's the procedure now?
Generally seeking new laptop advice. If Lenovo is not good is anyone using Toshiba?
Mike _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
I have been using Thinkpads for Linux for years. X200 (currently running C7) X220 (was Fedora, now W10) X240 (currently Fedora 24) X260 to be purchased shortly to take over the Fedora role
No problems, in fact I suspect that there must be Fedora developers using Thinkpads since they seem to just work
HTH
Ok, I see a lot of nice answers here so I would like to try to refine this a little.
After some research I was going to skip Lenovo. People are clearly having problems running Linux on Lenovos. I spoke with one person that had a really hard time with their X250. However, I think a lot of problems are caused by bleeding edge hardware. My feeling is it takes at least 1 year before the kernels have the necessary updates. Also, searching the Internet forums for problems is dubious because people who don't have problems don't say so on forums. But asking "is model XYZ known to work" is a good test as evidenced by these great responses. So I will ask again with some more specific details.
The key features for me are:
* 1080 display or 900 would be acceptable but definitely not 768 (this rules out Toshiba) * Good keyboard with mouse buttons (Lenovo has always had superior keyboards and fortunately that have recently resurrected mouse buttons, yeah!) * RJ-45 (this rules out a LOT of laptops including Dell) * Intel graphics / hardware
The Lenovo T series meets these requirements. My only concern would be issues mentioned on this list and bleeding-edge issues. I know people have had a lot of problems with the trackpad, screen flickering and other things. But I think most of this can be blamed on bleeding-edge hardware compatibility. For example, I think the synaptics driver is almost always broken in the latest models (move the mouse and it deletes everything you've typed!) but if you uninstall it and use libinput it can work.
So my thought is instead of getting the latest which would be T460, I could get the previous model which would be the T450. These are sold out on lenovo.com but they can still be had elsewhere (not sure about warranty which is hugely important though).
So does anyone have any specific knowledge of the T450, T450s, T450p?
I really appreciate all the answers. Hopefully this helps other folks too.
Mike
On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Michael B Allen ioplex@gmail.com wrote:
- RJ-45 (this rules out a LOT of laptops including Dell)
Correction. The Dell Latitude 14 7000 has RJ-45 on the back. It is very comparable to the Lenovo T460 actually. Anyone run CentOS successfully on either of these?
Mike
Once upon a time, Michael B Allen ioplex@gmail.com said:
The key features for me are:
- 1080 display or 900 would be acceptable but definitely not 768 (this
rules out Toshiba)
- Good keyboard with mouse buttons (Lenovo has always had superior
keyboards and fortunately that have recently resurrected mouse buttons, yeah!)
- RJ-45 (this rules out a LOT of laptops including Dell)
- Intel graphics / hardware
I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 4th generation notebook. The only thing on that list it doesn't have is the RJ-45 for the NIC; the NIC is built-in, but you have to use an adapter on the docking port to get the RJ-45. The adapter cable is relatively cheap and I haven't really found it a big deal to keep up with (and since the NIC is an Intel chip built in, it isn't some funky USB thing). It just doesn't have the port because the sides of the notebook are thinner than an RJ-45 port (it is just barely thick enough for the HDMI port).
I'm currently running Fedora 23 on it with no problems; don't know how well it would work with CentOS (since new hardware support, especially for notebooks, tends to lag some in RHEL). There was a Linux kernel bug related to power management in the initial F23 kernel that caused it to not boot; someone from Intel debugged it and fixed it.
Only other problem I had was I got the high-res display, which made my favorite terminal font (classic X bitmapped font "fixed" aka 6x13) too small to comfortably read. :) Solved that by just doubling the font size to 12x26! Wish someone would make an outline font that looks essentially the same so I could scale it (I've taken a look at trying a couple of times, but I have no skill for font work I've found).
On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 06:19:04PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
Only other problem I had was I got the high-res display, which made my favorite terminal font (classic X bitmapped font "fixed" aka 6x13) too small to comfortably read. :) Solved that by just doubling the font size to 12x26! Wish someone would make an outline font that looks essentially the same so I could scale it (I've taken a look at trying a couple of times, but I have no skill for font work I've found).
Sometimes, putting something like
Xft.dpi:180
in ~/.Xdefaults made all fonts usuable for me on most systems. I have a page about my adventures with the yoga2 (though not about CentOS on it.) https://srobb.net/yoga2.html
What I have found is that the default Fedora workstation auto scales fonts (and everything else for me). There are a few other ways to deal with fonts, such as using xrandr to scale, but in Fedora 24 and up, (you mentioned you were using F23), if you're using Gnome, it may be just automatically work. I tend to use more minimalist window managers but even so, with Fedora (and Arch) at least, the Xft.dpi:180 entry made most things readable.
-- Chris Adams linux@cmadams.net _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On 09/30/2016 09:02 AM, Michael B Allen wrote:
My feeling is it takes at least 1 year before the kernels have the necessary updates.
...
The key features for me are:
- 1080 display or 900 would be acceptable but definitely not 768 (this
rules out Toshiba)
- Good keyboard with mouse buttons (Lenovo has always had superior
keyboards and fortunately that have recently resurrected mouse buttons, yeah!)
- RJ-45 (this rules out a LOT of laptops including Dell)
- Intel graphics / hardware
Several of Dell's developer models have RJ-45, but those have better AMD or (optionally) NVidia graphics:
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop?c=us&l=en...
It's worth mentioning again that Dell is one of the companies doing the development for the bits that don't work, and that those drivers are often the ones that get Lenovo equipment going, too. Lenovo does not, to the best of my knowledge, do any Linux development.
On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 11:58 PM, Gordon Messmer gordon.messmer@gmail.com wrote:
It's worth mentioning again that Dell is one of the companies doing the development for the bits that don't work, and that those drivers are often the ones that get Lenovo equipment going, too. Lenovo does not, to the best of my knowledge, do any Linux development.
Well then that does it!
I just ordered a Dell Latitude E7470.
Thanks, Mike
On 01/10/16 05:02, Michael B Allen wrote:
Ok, I see a lot of nice answers here so I would like to try to refine this a little.
After some research I was going to skip Lenovo. People are clearly having problems running Linux on Lenovos. I spoke with one person that had a really hard time with their X250. However, I think a lot of problems are caused by bleeding edge hardware. My feeling is it takes at least 1 year before the kernels have the necessary updates. Also, searching the Internet forums for problems is dubious because people who don't have problems don't say so on forums. But asking "is model XYZ known to work" is a good test as evidenced by these great responses. So I will ask again with some more specific details.
The key features for me are:
- 1080 display or 900 would be acceptable but definitely not 768 (this
rules out Toshiba)
- Good keyboard with mouse buttons (Lenovo has always had superior
keyboards and fortunately that have recently resurrected mouse buttons, yeah!)
- RJ-45 (this rules out a LOT of laptops including Dell)
- Intel graphics / hardware
The Lenovo T series meets these requirements. My only concern would be issues mentioned on this list and bleeding-edge issues. I know people have had a lot of problems with the trackpad, screen flickering and other things. But I think most of this can be blamed on bleeding-edge hardware compatibility. For example, I think the synaptics driver is almost always broken in the latest models (move the mouse and it deletes everything you've typed!) but if you uninstall it and use libinput it can work.
So my thought is instead of getting the latest which would be T460, I could get the previous model which would be the T450. These are sold out on lenovo.com but they can still be had elsewhere (not sure about warranty which is hugely important though).
So does anyone have any specific knowledge of the T450, T450s, T450p?
I really appreciate all the answers. Hopefully this helps other folks too.
I have been using the high end ASUS laptops - i.e. Republic of Gamers machines since 2012 with CentOS6 and more recently with CentOS7. They were a challenge with 6.x in that I needed some elrepo drivers to get the keyboard backlight working but 7.x just works. These machines are almost server spec i7 with 16GB RAM, dual disk drives (one SSD, one rotating media) and separate nVidia graphics cards. YMMV but I'd buy another one any time.
Mike _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
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