Up-to-date hardware (laptop) recommendations?

[Shachar Shemesh]

On 29/11/15 21:02, Omer Zak wrote:
> (1/9) Shachar Shemesh/Roman Ovseitsev:
> Why connect internal monitor + 3 external monitors?
>
> My response:
> I was not clear in expressing my wishes.
> What I'd like to be able is to work at home with three monitors. I do
> not care if it is 3 external monitors (with disabled internal monitor)
> or 2 external monitors with an active internal monitor.
>
> Roman Ovseitsev's point about Skylake based laptop: not relevant since I
> do not need more than 3 monitors total.
My laptop has a fairly basic adapter. I seem to recall, though I have no
idea when I tried, that only two monitors simulteneously are supported.
I'm fairly certain that this is a GPU memory issue, though, as xrandr
does list a hefty list of potential ports (including, when docked,
subdisplays of the display port).
> -=-=-=-=-=-
>
> (2/9) Shachar Shemesh:
> Recommends Dell, which has reasonable Linux support.
> Uses Dell Latitude E7440.
>
> My response:
> What does "reasonable" mean here? Are there any features not well
> supported by Linux?
> Do other models in the E7000 series have as good reputation? If yes,
> I'll check if any of them supports total of 3 displays.
I can't think of anything that did not work for me, including setting
the track pad sensitivity, controlling the built in keyboard backlight
from the keyboard shortcut, and disabling/enabling the trackpad from the
keyboard shortcuts. Ubuntu 15.04 with kubuntu proved somewhat unstable
when docking/undocking (or, generally, when adding and removing the
external monitor). If you're willing to live with "dock, set monitor
state, logout and log in", then this is nothing serious.

I've also had trouble with the external monitor going blank when docked
sometimes. I've ended up swapping and swapping and swapping hardware
with others in the office, eventually blaming the motherboard. Dell's
support replaced it, and eventually the problem was resolved (it has
recently came back, but I havn't started the hardware swapping debugging
yet).

So, all in all, I have not come across anything that did not work for
me. You don't even need Windows/Dos to upgrade the BIOS. Just place the
BIOS upgrade file (an .EXE) on the UEFI boot partition, and use the BIOS
boot menu to select "BIOS upgrade".

There are some driver bugs, but nothing serious IMHO.
> (5/9) Boris Shtrasman:
> How about Legacy and UEFI (or only UEFI) mode?
>
> My response:
> UEFI should be OK, but I need to disable secure boot so that I'll be
> able to upgrade Linux kernels at whim.
At least Ubuntu have a signed GRUB, which means that the kernels need
not be signed at all (which defeats the whole purpose of secure UEFI,
but that's Microsoft's problem, not ours). My laptop does, in fact,
support legacy boot, but I ended up using UEFI anyways (I wanted to
experiment with it). I did end up disabling the secure UEFI boot, though
I don't think I had to.

One thing I did not expect was during motherboard replaement. With UEFI
the BIOS needs to know which OSes it is booting, which means that merely
replacing the BIOS and plugging in the same disk would not boot. The
BIOS has Windows preconfigured, but that's no help for obvious reasons.
You need to keep an Ubuntu DoK handy and do recovery reinstall of GRUB
to get the machine going again.

Also, Ubuntu install has great difficulty to install a legacy boot
Ubuntu if the live DoK was booted in UEFI mode and vice versa. Keep that
in mind during initial installation.

Their standard way to create the DoK these days is to take the ISO and
dd it on a DoK. This, suprisingly, creates a DoK that is bootable in
both legacy and UEFI mode. They managed to cram a bootloader, a UEFI
boot partition and an El Torrito boot loader in to the same image.

Shachar
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