Comment Stock up (Score 1) 272
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these babies!
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these babies!
I just bought a laptop myself (MSI-GT70), and the hardware (as far as I can tell) worked flawlessly with linux (even Optimus, see my above comment about bumblebee).
However, the major stumbling block was EFI and Windows Dual-Boot (I have my reasons):
No matter how I tried, I could not get any EFI bootloader to boot linux. I could get grub-efi, efi-shell, elilo, to all boot themselves, but none of them are able to boot the kernel. So I must use linux in Legacy (BIOS) mode.
Since windows is pre-installed, and the new recovery system isn't actually a proper installer (as far as I can tell. I haven't wanted to risk wiping the installation to test...), I must continue to boot windows in EFI mode.
So now my dual boot menu is actually chenging between BIOS and EFI, instead of choosing an option from the grub menu.
I honestly have to agree with the ease of setting up Bumblebee. When I bought my current laptop online, it was advertised as nVidia graphics, and nowhere did it mention intel... so I was disappointed (and quite confused) to find X using the intel driver. I had never heard of this Optimus thing, and 5 minutes later, I had bumblebee installed, and running.
From the relevant thread over at Seti@Home:
"Grad student Andrew Siemion reports that new modifications to a data recorder at Green Bank that we need for our Kepler SETI observations are now complete, thanks to a huge amount of help from Paul Demorest, a former grad student and one of initial authors of AstroPulse. Our first hour of test time is scheduled for this Saturday, 17:30 EDT. We'll be observing with 450 seconds per target on 90 Kepler field stars with interesting planet candidates (~habitable zone, ~Earth size, ~Earth period, ~several planets), then do a raster scan of the entire Kepler field. " - Eric Korpela
Why I'm going to be dressed as the Genetic Repo Man of course! But it's no costume...
If it's the same bug I kept hitting, try this:
edit
Short version: if the ac module is loaded, it boots fine. Something wonky in ACPI. This worked for me in 8.10, at least.
Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly.