LinuxCertified Laptop LC2100S

As you might know from reading my blog, at my workplace, we have largely standardized on Linux on the desktop and laptop.

We use systemimager to maintain a standard desktop image and a separate standard laptop image. These images differ because there are different assumptions. The desktop machines mount /home over NFS, authenticate to LDAP, etc. This doesn’t work on laptops. Moreover, desktops don’t use network-manager or wifi, but laptops do.

Our desktop image uses Debian’s hardware autodetection — plus a little hacking in /etc/init.d/gdm — to automatically adjust to a wide range of hardware. So far this has worked well.

Laptops are much more picky. Our standard laptop model had been the HP nc4400 — a small and light 12″ model that people here loved. HP discontinued that model. Their replacement was the 2510p. We ordered one in here for evaluation. Try as we might, we couldn’t get it to suspend and resume properly in Linux.

So I went out scouring the field of Linux laptops. Companies such as Emperor Linux buy retail laptops from people like Lenovo, test them for Linux, and sell them — at a premium. These were too expensive to justify at the quantities we need them.

Then I stumbled across Linux Certified. I’d never heard of them before. I called them up and asked a few questions. They don’t buy retail laptops, but instead have OEMs in Taiwan build laptops to their spec. They happen to use the same OEM that Fujitsu does, I believe. (No big company builds laptops in the USA these days). I asked them about wifi chipsets, video chipsets, whether they use stock kernels. I got clueful answers to all of these.

So we ordered one of their LC2100s models. They didn’t offer Debian preinstalled, but did offer Ubuntu, so I selected that. The laptop arrived a couple of days (!!) later, configured with the particular CPU, etc. that I selected.

I was surprised at the thrill I felt at taking a brand new laptop out of its box, turning it on, and watching Grub appear before my eyes. Ubuntu proceeded to boot. I then of course installed our regular Debian image on the thing to check it out.

It needed a kernel and xserver-xorg-video-intel from lenny, as well as the ipw3945 driver for wifi, but otherwise worked with the exact same software as our HP nc4400 image. (In fact, it wasn’t hard to support both laptops with that image, since both use a lot of Intel hardware.) The one trick was making hibernate call /etc/init.d/ipw3945d stop so that the ipw3945 module could be unloaded before suspend. (Why this particular chipset needs a daemon is beyond me, but oh well.)

The hardware is great. As far as I know, the ipw3945 was the only component that wasn’t directly and automatically supported by DFSG-free software in lenny main. The screen is sharp and high-contrast (it’s glossy, which I personally don’t like, but I bet our users will). The device itself feels sturdy. It’s small and dense. I haven’t opened it up, but it looks like all you need is a screwdriver to do so.

The only downside is that they don’t sell docking stations for it. Their standard answer on that is to buy a USB docking station. That’s a partial answer, but can’t handle power or video like a standard docking station will.

Also, the LC2100s is much cheaper than the HP laptop, even when configured when nicer specs in every way. That is no doubt partially due to the lack of the Windows tax.

I’m sending off an order for 4 more today, I believe.

11 thoughts on “LinuxCertified Laptop LC2100S

  1. bignose says:

    > the ipw3945 was the only component that wasn’t directly and automatically supported by DFSG-free software in lenny main

    I’d really like one of these notebooks, but I only want to support hardware with specs available for free software.

    Needing to use non-free software to drive the wireless interface would be a deal-breaker for me. What software did you end up using to drive it?

    The ‘ipw3945’ project page http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/ says the code is deprecated in favour of the ‘iwlwifi’ code, and hints that it’s free software in the mainline kernel. Is that true?

    1. Devdas Bhagat says:

      iwlwifi is the newer wireless driver architecture. The code is free and GPLed, the firmware is still a binary blob.

      1. bignose says:

        http://packages.debian.org/testing/misc/firmware-iwlwifi

        shows a copyright file that allows only binary distribution, not source. So it seems you’re right.

        Drat, that cinches it for me: no Intel x945 wireless device until they allow a free-software driver.

        1. Devdas Bhagat says:

          You mean, no wireless at all.

  2. Anonymous says:

    “Why this particular chipset needs a daemon is beyond me, but oh well.”

    Good call. :) It does not “need” the daemon for any useful functionality; rather, the daemon exists to *restrict* functionality, such as the ability to use unapproved frequencies.

    Use the iwlwifi driver, which moved that functionality into firmware and does not need a daemon. Not perfect, but less bad.

  3. Ivan R says:

    Hmmm…
    A great deal it would be, if not that small notice:
    “* Modem not supported in Linux”
    Although, reading the page further down, one can see the following text:
    “Currently recommended distributions on LC2210S: Fedora 8, Fedora 7, Ubuntu 7.10,
    Open SUSE 10.2, RHEL 5/CentOS 5/Oracle Linux*

    (*suspend, wireless and modem may not be supported with this distribution”

    So, does that notice apply only to Open SUSE/RHEK/CentOS/Oracle or to all linuxes?

  4. FWIW If you use modprobe -r instead of rmmod, it will kill the daemon for you prior to removing the module. That’s assuming Debian ships the equivalent modprobe config file to /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945 that I have on my Ubuntu system.

  5. rudy says:

    I too just bought this laptop. I really like it. Although there’s one things I can’t figure out. There’s a “fan” button right beside the power button. On my Unbuntu install, this turns on/off the suspend LED (suspend is disabled with this particular install). I have no idea what it does? There’s already a suspend Fn hotkey (which doesn’t work).

    1. John Goerzen says:

      I noticed that too, and I have no idea either.

  6. Tweeks says:

    Thanks for the great review! After stumbling through the Dell web site looking for a good Linux laptop, then hitting the Penguin Computing site (ouch! Expensive!)… the LC2100S looked like a perfect fit. Glad to ehar that they’re doing OWM builds.. that’s the way to do it and get away from that darn M$ tax.

    Good piece!

    Tweeks

  7. franki^ says:

    This looks like exactly what I was looking for, but it seems that this:
    http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux-laptop-lc2100sn.html
    is what they sell now, but I hope Debian runs as easily on it anyway..
    thanks for the informative article! :)

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