linux on 6000

seeing as you are a total linux newbie (or at least as it seems by this post) I would highly recommend Ubuntu (if you want gnome) or PCLinuxOS (if you want KDE). Both of those usually "JUST WORK" and are pretty laptop friendly.

If i am mistaken and you indeed know linux, then Gentoo is probably your best friend. Or if you wanna arrange your own funeral, LFS is always there

but yeah... Ubuntu and PCLOS get my votes.

i run Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my I6000d right now and its fricken awesome, everthing but the wifi light works out of the box

download the iso

burn it to a cd using Nero or Alcohol

put the cd in the CD drive

reboot. Enter bios settings (usually either Esc, F1, or F2) and make sure that the cd loads before the hard drive. Save and Exit.

Reboot with cd in drive. On welcome screen, press enter.

Follow onscreen instructions.

During "Set up hard DisK" step choose either "Use Entire Drive" to erase windows and have just linux, but better yet, select "Custom Parition Drive" (or something like that) and set up your partitions in such a way.
-shrink NTFS (windows) partition by about 15 or 20gb (or anything else you want)
- create a new swap partition. make it twice as big as your ram (so if you have a gig of ram, make it 2gb)
- create a new /boot parition. make it ext3 (crucial, other partition types will give you grub problems later) make this one about 100mb
- create a new / (root) partition. make if raiserfs, and take up the remaining free space.

keep coninuing the onscreen instructions.

it will ask you to restart, do so. then you ahve to wait again about 10-20 minutes until it sets everything up. then it will welcome you with a log-in screen.

at this point, check what hardware works, and waht doesn't, come back on the forms to report your findings and we'll help you get the rest up and running.


(the above was the install procedure for Ubuntu)

Uh read this part of what he typed again...

In other words setting up a dual boot is no problem.

Seablade

in other words, 90% of us here dual boot.

i only single boot my desktop (mandrake 2005), but my laptop is dual XP / Xubuntu. I go to XP for gaming or if i wanna use standby. and then go to xubuntu for everything else. setting up dual boot is easy, most distros do it automatically, your job is to just set up partitions and let 'er rip. once you get good with linux, then you can make fun tweaks with your bootloader such as add colors, background pictures, add/remove entries, and all that good stuff

and if you are wondering, standby works for me in linux in general, its just the ati drivers that are crap and give me (err..everyone) issues with standby, so if you ahve an ati card, don't count on it. nvidia is for sure the way to go with linux

Did you manage to get the wifi light to work at all? For me it is not just not running out of the box, I haven't found any way to get it working at all.

its a known bug right now that the wifi light does not work, and will not work untill one of the DEVs fix it. I've tried some various "hacks" to make it work but to no solution. As for everything else, what are you having problems with ?

Delvien:
Did you manage to get linux to use only the same or even less amount of power than windows uses with your i6k?
I tried everything I can think of (undervolting like in windows, activating the default=off powersaving of the wlan-card, speedstep at 800 MHz) and still linux in idle uses 8% more power than windows idle (same lightsettings, no swapping or anything, just plain desktop sitting there).
As I try to get maximum batterylife out of my laptop atm I am still using windows as linux just can't compare to windows in powersavin terms.
The worst are the wlan drivers, with wlan turned off (on win and linux) it's down to 4% difference.

I rarely get the light to work on XP, so I'm not sure it's that big a deal it doesn't work under Ubuntu.

If you are using anything other than Microsoft tools, most of the better ones will let you resize a partition without having to reformat the original.

Make SURE your drive is defragmented before this though, otherwise you might shrink the partition and lose some data that is off at the end of it due to fragmentation. Obviously make sure oyu have space on the drive as well.

Seablade

yep.

pretty much defrag first. then run gparted (or qtparted) of a livecd, or Partition Magic if you have that installed, and it will let you reformat to your wishes. I believe the generic ubuntu paritioner has that too, but don't quote me on that, since i never had to change my table with ubuntu, only reformat the linux partitions i was about to use.

Try the new ATI drivers . with powerstate settings, i can get about 3 hours on a ful charge (6 cell battery )with brightness all the way down. With brightness on high i get 2 and a half hours.

Refer to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...&highlight=ATI



As for power consumption.. Linux takes more , try a app called EMIFREQ, it can lower your CPU usage down to 800 mhz, I havent discovered how to undervolte in linux without hacking the kernel which i dont want to do.

i would recommend kubuntu for that laptop simply because you will have it working 100% on first boot. PCLOS might work as well(most likely it will, but i simply havent tried it yet), but ubuntu is just a guaranteed success.

here is a thing, go with Ubuntu (not Kubuntu or Xubuntu or Edubuntu for that metter). Just plain old Ubuntu.

The answer does NOT lie in the desktop that is used, but more in the overall package. Kubuntu, (Hoary and Breezy) are known to be plagued with Kubuntu-specific bugs that don't exist for Ubuntu. The good news is that the kubuntu team is working very hard to make sure it is FINE for the Daper Drake release (6.04).

And here are quick reasons against edubuntu and xubuntu):

Edubuntu - includes a lot of extra networking and file sharing stuff made specifically for LAB WORK. Educational tools you don't need.

Xubuntu - although great, and with just a few tweaks much faster (and stable) than regular ubuntu, still xfce is not a noob-friendly as gnome is, and also notice i said it will require tweaks (although not hard, still not for a first time user) (<===== coming from a current Xubuntu user and a 4 year linux "experimenter")


as for PCLOS... i am sure it will work just fine. So if you want a KDE desktop, go PCLOS (not Kubuntu). Also the beauty of PCLOS is comes bundled with Nvidia and ATI drivers, just make sure to get the pclos.0.9.2_ati.iso (or whatever its called) and you'll have fglrx configed from the get-go, no confusing and often difficult fglrx setups.

As I don't play with my laptop I took the i6k with integrated graphics (to get more batterytime) so new Ati-drivers won't work for me

You have to patch the kernel to undervolt, yes, works great.

Instead of Emifreq I use powernowd, another speedstep daemon, but as I said, runtimes are compared at same states, idle, 800mhz fsb, 0.7v corevoltage, same lightsetting, same lansetting.
And it's the calced time and the powerconsumption reported by the system that differ in 5-8% which leads to me still using windows.