Today a friend brought over a new Lenovo SL510-2847d2u laptop with Win7 pre-installed on it. He got it for his wife while shopping in Grand Island. Her previous XP driven laptop had been compromised by malware, resulting in her having to change her credit card and bank pin numbers and passwords. So she decided that online shopping and banking will be done on Linux from now on.
Not every Lenovo works with Linux: the mic, wifi and video being the main touchy areas.
Lucid 10.4.2 slipped onto this SL510 like a silk glove. Wifi, 3D video and sound worked out of the box. The microphone setting needed an adjustment after I discovered that Skype's webcam worked, and I could hear the Test call lady's voice, but I could not get my voice to record. I fired up alsamixer as root and found that the PCM and Digital sliders were at 0. I raised them to the top of the white zone. I closed alsamixer and opened the KMixer configuration dialog. I dragged everything over into the display side. I checked the "Capture" button and slide it to near the top. When I set the "Input Source" to "Mic" the internal mic in the lid works. When I set it to "Front Mic" the headset microphone plugged into the mic jack works.
I also had to install Adobe's "Square" flash player and install that libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/firefox-3.6.13/plugins directory so that YouTube video would play. Medibundu was useful too.
He bought it locally for a little over $500 (same price as at Amazon) and it is worth the price.
I noticed during the install that three primary partitions were used to install Win7, with the OS being on sda2. Sda1 was 107Mb (Lenovo stuff), and sda3 was the 10.7GB Windows recovery blob. The guy wanted to leave Win7 only 70B and give the rest to Kubuntu. But, when I came to the partition section I had two remaining options (giving Kubuntu the whole drive wasn't an option
): one was letting Kubuntu have half of the 480Gb left on sda2 or custom partition. I tried custom partition but when I selected sda2 I wasn't given the option of resizing sda2, so I when with the 50-50 split. I hadn't noticed before that the install routine doesn't give a resize option on a partition.
Anyway, if you are in need of an economy notebook with 500Gb of HD, dual core, and a good Linux fit the $550 Lenovo SL510-2847d2u would be a good choice.
Not every Lenovo works with Linux: the mic, wifi and video being the main touchy areas.
Lucid 10.4.2 slipped onto this SL510 like a silk glove. Wifi, 3D video and sound worked out of the box. The microphone setting needed an adjustment after I discovered that Skype's webcam worked, and I could hear the Test call lady's voice, but I could not get my voice to record. I fired up alsamixer as root and found that the PCM and Digital sliders were at 0. I raised them to the top of the white zone. I closed alsamixer and opened the KMixer configuration dialog. I dragged everything over into the display side. I checked the "Capture" button and slide it to near the top. When I set the "Input Source" to "Mic" the internal mic in the lid works. When I set it to "Front Mic" the headset microphone plugged into the mic jack works.
I also had to install Adobe's "Square" flash player and install that libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/firefox-3.6.13/plugins directory so that YouTube video would play. Medibundu was useful too.
He bought it locally for a little over $500 (same price as at Amazon) and it is worth the price.
I noticed during the install that three primary partitions were used to install Win7, with the OS being on sda2. Sda1 was 107Mb (Lenovo stuff), and sda3 was the 10.7GB Windows recovery blob. The guy wanted to leave Win7 only 70B and give the rest to Kubuntu. But, when I came to the partition section I had two remaining options (giving Kubuntu the whole drive wasn't an option
): one was letting Kubuntu have half of the 480Gb left on sda2 or custom partition. I tried custom partition but when I selected sda2 I wasn't given the option of resizing sda2, so I when with the 50-50 split. I hadn't noticed before that the install routine doesn't give a resize option on a partition.Anyway, if you are in need of an economy notebook with 500Gb of HD, dual core, and a good Linux fit the $550 Lenovo SL510-2847d2u would be a good choice.