On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 7:30 AM, H.S.Rai hardeep.rai@gmail.com wrote:
Wanted to purchase laptop with touch (convertible; 2 in 1; laptop cum tablet). Could not find Linux friendly, Linux certified. Vendor was of opinion that any device with MS Window 8, will be hard to use with Linux.
Can any one suggest make and model which works well with Linux?
I recently bought a Lenovo ultrabook U310 touchscreen (with Windows 8.1) 24GB Sandisk SSD, 500GB WD HDD. 4GB RAM, i5 3rd gen, Intel graphics.
Before I blow away Windows, I have tried out Linux compatibility (firmware in Legacy mode) with following LiveCDs (amd64 KDE desktop)
1. openSUSE 13.1 (Touchscreen NOK, LAN OK, WiFi OK, Display OK, BT OK, fdisk -l does not list the Windows partition correctly as displayed in Disk Managament in Windows 8.1)
2. Debian Wheezy (Touchscreen NOK, LAN OK, WiFi NOK, Display OK, BT OK, fdisk -l does not list the Windows partition correctly as displayed in Disk Managament in Windows 8.1)
3. Ubuntu 13.10 (Touchscreen NOK, LAN OK, Display OK, WiFi OK, BT OK, fdisk -l does not list the Windows partition correctly as displayed in Disk Managament in Windows 8.1)
4. Fedora 20 (Touchscreen OK, LAN OK, Display OK, WiFi OK, BT OK, fdisk -l **does** list the Windows partition correctly as displayed in Disk Managament in Windows 8.1)
All of the above were much faster than the factory installed Windows 8.1. Linux font rendering also looks better :)
Fedora 20 comes out a winner with *all* functionality working, including hot keys like display brightness, mousepad, WiFi on/off but ... Debian being my distro of choice I realize there is some tweaking involved.
My take on the U310 - with some tweaking (drivers+firmware), it is possible to get your favorite distro working on it.
PS - Lenovo forums has a special Linux Discussions group for specific questions; the forum is quite active.
HTH, -- Arun Khan