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Which Linux Laptop


tallkien

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  • 2 weeks later...

Go for it :)

I just did it properly (I tried before and it was working ok but I never got all the bells and whistles working before).

I have a generation 3 MBP (with santa rosa + nvidia), so I used a combination of these two wiki pages

(except the audio was working out of the box and I skipped couple of things).

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MacBookPro

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MacBookPro/SantaRosa

I also installed pommed to set screen and keyboard lighting

(compilation needs some extra dev libraries to be installed, but quite simple to do)

As a side note I suggest to do a backup on an external USB/Firewire drive using Superduper! on OSX (the free version is enough for this),

and make sure it's bootable from the external drive.

It works perfectly with Houdini, but I will still keep a copy of OSX around for daily non-houdini stuff.

Edited by kodiak
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Oh, btw..this is not to say I would suggest MBP as a good Houdini laptop for corporate use. If you need a mobile workstation, you're better off with an IBM or Dell. MBP is better for using OSx as a main system and occasionally trying/learning stuff under linux/windows. It works, but there are better and supported ones out there.

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I don't think you're going to have issues with performance on the MBP, it's just not designed for running Linux full time.

Also, I didn't manage to get that kind of battery life I can get on OSX. It's about 4 hours or so with Better energy savings settings and turnning down the backlight while on Ubuntu I made sure all the power management stuff is working properly, wrote custom scripts to regulate my power use, fan speed..etc and still can only get up to about 2 hours. So if you're planning to use it a lot on the go (which I suppose is impossible running a 3D app anyways) than you might be better off with some other systems (but I'm not sure if it's an OS issue or an OS thing specific to this laptop).

cheers,

Andras

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I tried it with 7.10 64 bit, and it works awesome. Usually i'm on xp 32, and 64bit ubuntu really makes the difference. Not to mention that tyeh finally made installing nvidia driver a breeze.

When You first log on just go to the restriced driver menu in the system menu and click enable, it will automatically install the driver and all You need to do is to reboot.

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Same here, 64bit Ubuntu 7.10 on a MBP generation3 (santa rosa nvidia). It doesn't install the nvidia driver by default so you need to add the _new_ one using the package manager, but apart from that if you follow the links I've posted before, it works perfectly. I was thinking about creating an image for this laptop ready to install 3d apps and post it on my website, but I need to look into the licensing part of it.

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