Your laptop experience with CentOS

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N8tiv
Posts: 38
Joined: 2014/10/23 00:16:57
Location: Anchorage, AK 99508

Your laptop experience with CentOS

Post by N8tiv » 2017/09/12 04:11:14

Hello all,

I was just wondering, who all here… Runs CentOS on their laptop? Was it fairly easy, to install? What is a nightmare to install? How well does CentOS play with Nvidia cards & Broadcom wireless drivers & touchpads?

Any kind of feedback, tips & tricks and things to look out for when considering CentOS on a laptop…

Thank you in advance,

Rob

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igorek24
Posts: 90
Joined: 2013/11/13 06:11:37

Re: Your laptop experience with CentOS

Post by igorek24 » 2017/09/12 06:07:13

Well Nvidia is always a nightmare. Installation is fairly easy. I'm not sure about broadcom, but I know that performance wise it would suck.. Toutchpads are working out of the box. I used to run it on my Asus G75vw but decided to switch to Fedora and never looked back. CentOS is the best OS outhere for servers in my opinion but for desktop, I would look elsewhere. I did run it on my laptop for about two years.

N8tiv
Posts: 38
Joined: 2014/10/23 00:16:57
Location: Anchorage, AK 99508

Re: Your laptop experience with CentOS

Post by N8tiv » 2017/09/12 16:21:56

igorek24 wrote:Well Nvidia is always a nightmare. Installation is fairly easy. I'm not sure about broadcom, but I know that performance wise it would suck.. Toutchpads are working out of the box. I used to run it on my Asus G75vw but decided to switch to Fedora and never looked back. CentOS is the best OS outhere for servers in my opinion but for desktop, I would look elsewhere. I did run it on my laptop for about two years.
Hello Asus! :lol:
As I type this, I'm on G75VX! :-)

It's kind of nice to know, that if I do choose to install CentOS on my laptop… That is pretty much work out of the box.

I can always activate my mobile/cell phone hotspot, tethering? Until I can get my network card working, at least sufficiently… If the video driver that comes with CentOS, seems to work okay… I'm not even going to try to bother with installing an Nvidia driver, at least not right away…
I'm more concerned with a functioning laptop, then how the graphics look on my laptop…

My production environment is CentOS 7, would be nice to be able to practice on my laptop before making changes to my production machine.

I've been toying with the idea, having Fedora 25 Workstation… Or, Tiny Core as my native OS…

Then going with something like, KVM… Then, SmartOS within KVM… So I could get "bare metal" performance. Then installing CentOS, within a "zone" to practice with before making changes to the live production.

But, if CentOS is pretty much going to work out of the box… I think you just made my decision a lot easier. :-)

Thanks,

Rob

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igorek24
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Re: Your laptop experience with CentOS

Post by igorek24 » 2017/09/12 16:45:38

The only issue I had with clean install and Nouveau, was that I couldn't adjust LCD backlit brightens but I did managed to work some how. For me, laptop/desktop should work without me compiling kernel and different packages to get latest version and that's why I decided to use Fedora which is pretty much the same thing except its running latest kernel and all of the packages are bleeding-edge and that's how I like it.

I've been running CentOS/Fedora on my laptop for about 4 years now and I love it.

nacefb
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Joined: 2017/09/12 16:41:09

Re: Your laptop experience with CentOS

Post by nacefb » 2017/09/12 16:47:37

Hello there
I am using centos7 on my laptop for about 3 years now, and it's working like a charm
no problem with drivers and it's like production environnement
you can tweak it with repo that provide more software for gui

N8tiv
Posts: 38
Joined: 2014/10/23 00:16:57
Location: Anchorage, AK 99508

Re: Your laptop experience with CentOS

Post by N8tiv » 2017/09/13 02:45:57

igorek24 wrote:The only issue I had with clean install and Nouveau, was that I couldn't adjust LCD backlit brightens but I did managed to work some how. For me, laptop/desktop should work without me compiling kernel and different packages to get latest version and that's why I decided to use Fedora which is pretty much the same thing except its running latest kernel and all of the packages are bleeding-edge and that's how I like it.

I've been running CentOS/Fedora on my laptop for about 4 years now and I love it.
How did Fedora work out of the box? With your G75VW?

ixeous
Posts: 113
Joined: 2005/07/07 13:01:59

Re: Your laptop experience with CentOS

Post by ixeous » 2017/09/13 19:44:55

CentOS has worked well on laptops for me once it has working drivers. My last 2 systems had issues with drivers until some of the point release updates added them. The previous system did not have working wifi drivers. My current system (Asus UX303U) would not work properly with the video card. In each case, I was able to painlessly install and use Ubuntu LTS which my current system still has. I don't really care for the release cycle of Fedora even though upgrades are better than they used to be.

I have also been using CentOS on my desktop system at work for several years and just installed it on a brand new Dell Optiplex system. The only weirdness right now is that tunnelling X over ssh kills the local X server. Haven't dug into it to figure out why yet.

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