Fedora 17 on laptop?

[agriz]

I have a laptop which came with windows 7.
I want to install fedora 17 on this laptop.

i5, 4gb ram, 1gb graphics card.
Will all the laptop functions work after switching to linux?
Battery level, touchpad, function keys...?

[Adunaic]

Generally everything works fine.

There may be issues with some pieces of hardware. If you could post more details we may be able to tell.

The easiest thing to do is create a livecd/usb and boot the laptop from that. You can then see if everything will work without overwritting it all.

[agriz]

Good Idea.
I am now using the live cd.

Touch Pad have problems. Unable make clicks from it.
Battery remaining hour 2. But it should be more than 4.

[Adunaic]

Okay. First things first, assuming you are using GNOME:

Touchpad.

1. At the top right of the screen, click on your name.
2. Click System settings.
3. Click Mouse & Touchpad
4. Click on the tab labelled Touchpad.
5. Tick the box Enable mouse clicks with touchpad. (Perhaps the scrolling options as well.)

Secondly, battery life. This is a trick one, my understanding is that the windows drivers are tuned by the companies to get maximum battery life. There are a few things you can do:
1. Install powertop (http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...e-in-fedora-15)
2. If there are two graphics cards (like with nvidia optimus, I think the nvidia card draws a lot of power and cannot be shut off in linux.)

[agriz]

Great. Touch Pad is working. I didn't know there is a settings for touch pad

Its NVIDIA OPTIMUS.
Will that powertop help?

Can i test installing that software in live cd mode?

---------- Post added at 11:21 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:17 AM ----------

PHP Code:

The battery reports a discharge rate of 17.2 W
The estimated remaining time is 104 minutes

Summary: 282.8 wakeups/second,  0.0 GPU ops/second, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 6.7% CPU use

                Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
            100.0%                      Device         Audio codec hwC0D0: Realtek
            100.0%                      Device         Audio codec hwC0D3: Intel
             19.2 ms/s      79.2        Process        /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -background none -logverbose 7 -auth /var/run/gdm/auth-for-gdm-KMUTUw/database
              1.6 ms/s      47.5        Interrupt      [42] i915
             18.9 ms/s      33.1        Process        gnome-terminal
             14.4 ms/s      34.3        Process        /usr/bin/gnome-shell
              1.8 ms/s      25.3        Interrupt      [7] sched(softirq)
            406.5 µs/s      14.0        Interrupt      [1] timer(softirq)
              1.5 ms/s      12.4        Process        /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox
            123.2 µs/s       9.7        kWork          ieee80211_iface_work
            641.3 µs/s       8.0        Interrupt      [6] tasklet(softirq)
              2.4 ms/s       4.1        Interrupt      [23] ehci_hcd:usb2
            463.3 µs/s       1.4        Process        /usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon
             10.7 µs/s       1.3        Timer          clocksource_watchdog
             16.8 µs/s       1.2        kWork          flush_to_ldisc
              1.3 ms/s       0.7        Process        powertop
              9.7 µs/s       0.9        Timer          death_by_timeout
              3.9 µs/s       0.9        Timer          intel_gpu_idle_timer
             14.1 µs/s       0.8        kWork          i915_gem_retire_work_handler
            134.3 µs/s       0.6        Process        nm-applet
              8.3 µs/s       0.4        Process        [ksoftirqd/0]
              0.0 µs/s       0.4        kWork          disk_events_workfn
              7.9 µs/s      0.30        Process        [watchdog/2]
              5.7 µs/s      0.30        Process        [watchdog/3]
              5.2 µs/s      0.30        Process        [watchdog/1]
            100.1 µs/s      0.25        Process        /usr/sbin/NetworkManager --no-daemon
              0.7 ms/s      0.00        Interrupt      [44] iwlwifi 


This is the output of powertop

[Adunaic]

I do not think that powertop will help with optimus.

You can install software in a livecd mode, (unless you set it up with persistant storage) they will be removed when you restart the machine.

In power top you can scroll to the right (use the arrow keys). Then there are options to toggle. By pressing enter you can toggle from bad to good to enable powersaving measures. Not sure what they all do, I toggle all of them. I got an extra hour out of my laptop by doing this.