Fedora Win
February 14th, 2010
I recently came into some new hardware, an Alienware M9700 laptop. The thing is a beast, both in processing power and sheer size. Disappointingly, Dell seems to have tainted Alienware, as what would normally ship as a clean, optimized installation is now cluttered with shit.
I have unavoidable needs for Windows on this box, so I decided to dual boot it. With as new as the hardware is, I figured XP would just be asking for trouble, so I decided to go with Windows 7. I figured with both the newness and hype of Windows 7, it actually contained drivers that were written this millennium.
When I first booted into Windows, I noticed the sound card wasn’t detected. It wasn’t hard to spot, as the system tray icon was huge due to the 800×600 resolution it was running in since the video card wasn’t detected either. Amazingly, the network cards were picked up, which didn’t really matter since Alienware doesn’t have Windows 7 64-bit drivers for… well, anything.
Seriously Dell, what did you do to that company? I used to have nothing but great things to say about them.
Dejected, I rebooted into my Fedora installation disk. A few minutes later, I was listening to music and trying to not go blind at the 1920×1200 resolution. Both of which worked fine out of box. And for the record, my video card is an NVidia GeForce Go.
This makes my head hurt. This laptop is for my wife, who is non-technical (that’s putting it mildly). If I were to sit here down to do the installation with both the Windows and Fedora installers, it’s pretty clear she’d end up with a much more usable system running Fedora. Apparently, when the people on the commercials were saying what they wanted in Windows 7, no one mentioned drivers.
andy york
February 14th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
check out http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook
It’s lots like XP in look and feel. Put it on a netbook for six year old grandson. Not as scary for windows folks to get the hang of. Best of luck.
Adam
February 14th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
Reminds me of the article from a few years back entitled “Windows not ready for the Desktop.”
Now, I wonder what happens when you try to run Blender on it. I know that when I try on my Lenovo it makes the screen refresh so often it is unusable.
Jay
February 14th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Andy – I wasn’t clear, the Windows need isn’t my wife’s hesitation. In fact, she dove into Linux pretty openly, loving gimp and the digital camera support. I’m just using the windows partition for iTunes, Quicken, and some other one off things like that. Thanks for the link though, it’s a cool idea to ease the transition.
Matt Walton
February 15th, 2010 at 3:14 am
You’d think Microsoft would make sure that an nVidia chip would be detected, even if they don’t have the drivers for it… but then, laptop hardware can be a bit crazy.
The usual problem with things like this, I think, is that manufacturers don’t expect ordinary people to install an operating system. Most Windows users get Windows on their computer, and keep it just like that until they get another computer. That’s what makes it worth putting all the crap on, because they don’t even know you can get rid of it.