Couple Linux Questions

Ubuntu is (aorund here and in general AFAIK) the most noob friendly out there...alos heard great things about its support.

About the Fn+ Fx jey thing, if I remember correctly try those settings when in bios...if they work they will work in linux (Like my 5720 Fn+F kicked the fans into high)

IDK about the rest :\

Unfortunatly you don't, or at least not for all notebooks. They still need to be mapped to an action, however most desktop oriented distros aimed at the home user will allow you to do this in one way or another, so yes they can be made to work.

Yes there are power management tools out there, for the CPU definitly, the screen though, if you don't have hardware control over it(Via Fn keys, those WOULD be in the BIOS usually, sometimes not though) then I can't help you much as it has been quite some time since I ran linux on a laptop unfortunatly.

Seablade

first of all i must advocate that you use ubuntu on your laptop. recently Fedora has really went down the sh*tter, and mandrake i think is doing a great job, but its the little things in their distro (like needing to buy PowerPack+ to be able to configure an atheros card through their networking tool...)that kills it for me.

ubuntu on the other hand has been a joy to use on my laptop ever since 4.10 (first public release) days...Dapper is better than ever and I really can't wait for Edgy next month. In my experience (and i am sure many others will back me up) but Ubuntu probably ahs the highest success rate of most things working out of the box w/o extra configurations.

on my laptop I have an AMD cpu which is controlled by powernowd which switches it back and forth between low (800mhz), high (2ghz) and 2 settings in between (1200 and 1800). Fglrx (the ati driver) controls switching the GPU from 100 some mhz, to 400mhz for when i need the juice (or not) for graphical stuff. Screen auto-dims still when i unplug power, and Fn buttons all still work perfectly. The hardware buttons for launching internet browser and email program also works out of the box.

the truth is that if it can be done on one distro, you can get it to work on all of them....who likes to work hard when you can just work smart.

I just want to make a comment about Ubuntu being a noob distro... Just because it's easy to use doesn't mean it's not as powerful as a distro like Gentoo. I have tons of dev stuff configured on my system and I compile alot of my software and a few customized kernels. Ubuntu is getting to be pretty mainstream so some people loose sight of the fact that it can be a power user's distro too.

cpu scaling monitor does not work with all cpus though, like it doesn't work with my amd64 so i actually had to install cpuspeedy / gtk-cpuspeedy to be able to manually switch speeds, most of the time i let powernow just take care of it for me though.

Strange that it doesn't work on your AMD64. It works fine on mine. It might be that the powernow-k8 module isn't loaded or that it was compiled against your kernel (either in the kernel or as a module)

Ubuntu didn't work for me with my Dell. I could never get the wireless to work, i was stuck!!! I am new so i didn't know what to do But i have got Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop running and it works like a dream.

$50 MONEY WELL SPENT!

ehh...to each his own.

nfc, I think we get the cpicture after you have posted nearly the exact same thing in three different threads thus far. You had better luck with Suse in your situation. But going with three seperate threads to say that is going a bit overboard.

Seablade