On Thu, Apr 09, 2020 at 11:56:07AM +1000, terryc wrote:
> This is a hardware question.
> Which brand and model(s) of laptop have people successfully installed
> devuan onto?
> How difficult was it?

Purism's Librem 15, version 3.

Comes with coreboot and the Intel Management engine disabled.

No problem at all installing Devuan Ascii and upgrading to beowulf.
The only real problem was configuring the touch pad to interpret
multiple fingers as a middle click on the mouse. Works now.

But I find I prefer a real mouse to a touchpad. I use a USB wireless
mouse. I wish, in fact, there was an easy way to turn the touchpad off
while a mouse is connected. Its too easy to brush against it while
typing and suddenly be typing into a completely different location than
intended. (I don't want it permanently disabled; I'd like to, say, be
able to switch to a touchpad when my mouse battery runs out. And I
don't want to have to use the mouse to point and click anywhere to
activate that!

Once installed Debian buster as well in a separate partition as dual-boot.
No problem either. I plan to try a cross-grade from buster to beowulf
to test the official crossgrade instructions *when they become
available*.

I had a problem activating Purism's own linux distro. It's Debian
derivative with systemd, by the way. Although I have no doubt it would
install trouble-free, it insisted on encrypting my entire hard drive for
security. I didn't want that. For me, forgetting the key is a greater
risk than someone stealing my laptop and accessing the contents.

The only complaints I have about the hardware are:
* No visual indication whether any of the shift-locks on the keyboard
are active. There's the regular upper-case shift and the num-lock for
the numeric keypad.
* All the keys feel the same (except for bumps on the F and J keys for
tough-typists). The result is it's really easy to be trying to use
cursor keys and accidently hit nearby keys instead.

----

I had previously used an Asus EEEPC -- the first one that needed *no*
proprietary drivers. (the very first one did need a proprietary driver
-- I forget what for) It was about a decade old when I installed Devuan
jessie on it. No problem except figuring out how to boot from a USB
stick. Even after configuring the boot order in the BIOS, I still had
to press a particular key combination when booting to get it to consider
USB as a boot device.

It too has been upgraded to beowulf. I still use it occasionally for
smaller, less memory- and CPU-demanding tasks such as emacs text-editing
at nanowrimo write-ins. It's lighter-weight and thus easier to
carry around than the new one.

----


I'm also using Devuan ascii on my home server. No problem there except
the machine is ancient and starting to fail. It's old enough not to
have the Intel management engine. Anyway, this question was about
laptops.

-- hendrik