One hour you might be on a corporate LAN with an hardwired Ethernet connection, and the next at the airport on a wireless 802.11x network. Portable users need to be able to quickly swap between wildly disparate networking environments.

Network support for laptops is different from network support on desktops. This includes fast power on and off and acoustic considerations. I define power management as the ability to provide efficient use of battery resources.

I’m going to take a look at SuSE 9.2 from those angles. There are two criteria that I believe make a portable computer usable power management and network support. Linux on the portable desktop is just now coming into it’s own thanks to the hard work of SuSE. Linux on the desktop has come of age and is now an extremely viable home and enterprise solution for computing. Since then, Linux has made quantum leaps in usability for the common man.

I have been using Linux for about 8 years, since Redhat 5.2 way back in 1997. Strides have been made to remedy these issues, and SUSE has hit a home run with 9.2 professional. The fan would run constantly, and battery consumption would suffer greatly. Due to the lack of mature ACPI support in most modern distributions, I have had to deal with a very large amount of suffering.Īn hour into a coding session my laptop would just die without warning. Imagine using your laptop without a battery meter, or any noticeable fan control whatsoever. Many Linux distributions have little or no real ACPI support. Things that just work when running Windows XP are either horribly broken, or simply not implemented at all under Linux. Linux laptop support has been in my experience abysmal at best.

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