Alienware & Linux

Dear Filip,

I had the same problem when I installed ubuntu on my Area51.  I did resolve the problem but the bad news is I am an old man and do not remember how.  I do know I got the solution from the ubuntu forum.

I had to install Windows back on so I could get some hardware warranty stuuf done but am getting ready to install linux again.

I will put the solution on here if I rercall it or if I have to go find it again.n n If you locate it please postm itm here also.

TC,

Wang

Hello Wang,

Issue is still there. However I've been able to work-around it. I've configured my kernel to hibernate(S4) instead of shutdown(S5) as I don't care in which of these two states the machine is. 

Regards,

Filip

Filip,

If you are already experienced with LINUX, please disregard...

I haven't been in this group for long but if it's similar to other owner SIG's I'm thinking you won't get a whole lot of help on *nix.  There are a lot of really great LINUX products out there, so I suggest you take a look at several, to see which one fills your requirements the best.  I was in the same situation on one of my legacy desktops.  I decided to give LINUX Mint a try and I love it.  I just got a 15 R2 so I'm hesitant to ditch Windows 10 just this second, but like you, I hate the direction that Microsoft is taking with the Wintel platform.

Be forewarned: LINUX isn't for everyone, and god knows I'm finding myself referring to google and other forum's to figure things out, but Mint is probably one of the most user friendly flavors I can think of.  It is based on Ubuntu, but has a lot of things added to make it a little smoother for us novice LINUX users.

Secondly, don't expect a whole lot of cross platform compatibility, even though there are a number of applications like WINE (a Windows run time environment and NOT an emulator), so little things like iTunes won't work.  That being said, the UNIX community provides tons of freeware that will work almost as well as the Windows applications it's competing with.

Next, since I don't know your experience level with LINUX or the cli, not every application has a gui equivelant.  Some of the stuff you have to weed through the os's directory structure, which is rather bizarre for those of us who learned on drive letters and UNC path's, to find the script that executes the command or app you want to run.

All that being said, I have it running on an old Precision engineering workstation and an inspiron laptop and the workstation runs the unix equivelant applications faster than any of my newest Windows desktops and the laptop has half the memory, probably 2/3rd's the perfomance is *** near as fast as my new 15 r2.

Now, a bit of advice to you and anybody else who is thinking about venturing into the world of LINUX, learn from my fail and read and research before you ask questions.  Some of those folks, while incredibly insightful and brilliant, simply don't handle those of us who are new to the OS very well.  A lot of them tend to forget that we're all new at one point and seem to think that it's rather uncouth to come in asking a million questions, when most of it is clearly stated in the user's manual, man  pages or available through google.

Last bit of advice, it might be worth the 80 to 100 bucks for a seperate internal hard drive, to just experiment with a LINUX distro, before committing your factory storage devices to a different OS.  If it ***, you pull the linux drive out and pop the original back in and you've lost basically nothing. except for a couple bucks and a little bit of time. Also keep in mind that you don't need a massive multi-terabyte drive for LINUX either, as it doesn't require near the amount of disk space for all the *** you probably won't ever use.

As for system vendors like Dell (et. al) picking up support for LINUX, I don't see that happening any time soon as there are just too many variants of it, with each having enough idiosyncrasies that it's impossible to provide uniform and consistent support, in areas that most of us need help in.  Or, if they do pick up support for LINUX it will either be commercial versions like Red Hat or specific versions like Ubuntu or Fedora, and nothing else, like Gentoo or Centos.

Good luck and hope some of my rant helps a lttle.

bws

So, how did you got the GFX button to work in Linux?