Linux laptop support
If you are working at a company that sells Laptops what can vendors do to ensure proper Linux support? How can vendors or the community help keep track of proper Linux support? Although typically proper Linux support comes from partnerships with selling laptops, a bottom's up approach should also attainable. What would that look like?
Testing
What testing suites are available to help test proper Linux support? Please add here your git tree or project test page describing what it does.
Things to test for
- Fn keys: Do all the Fn keys (in special/media key mode) send input events and do the reported key presses match with the symbols on the keys?
- Does toggling the touchpad on/off work (if there is a hotkey) and does this get reported to userspace, that is is an on screen display (OSD) notification shown when the touchpad is toggled on/off
- Is there a /sys/class/leds/.. interface to control the kbd-backlight and does toggling through a kbd-hotkey show an OSD with the current kbd-backlight level
- Does the rfkill hotkey / hw-switch on the side of the laptop work and does userspace see this (.e.g. airplane mode OSD gets shown when toggling rfkill)
- do the speaker / mic mute keys work. Do their builtin LEDS get updated (if they have builtin LEDs) is an OSD shown when toggling mic/speaker mute on off
- If this is a convertible is there an input device reporting SW_TABLET_MODE so that GNOME knows when to show an onscreen keyboard when a text field is focused (SW_TABLET_MODE=1) and when not to show an OS
- Test if video output is working. Verify if GPU acceleration works
- Does LCD-brightnesscontrol work?
- Do USB ports work?
- Does the keyboard work?
- Does the pointing device work?
- Does audio (speakers + mic + jack) work?
WiFi: for WiFI there are public test suites
hostapd / wpa_supplicant have their respective unit tests
Using mac80211_hwsim can simulate any new bleeding edge technology, useful for generic mac80211 testing
Wifi Alliance Wi-Fi Test Suite Linux DUT - Wi-Fi Test Suite is a software platform developed by Wi-Fi Alliance to support certification program development and device certification. Wi-Fi Test Suite is used by ATLs to certify Wi-Fi Alliance members’ products primarily utilizing the FlexTrack certification path.
Bluetooth - the only known test plan is Ubuntu's old Bluetooth test plan
Existing effort
There are a collection of URLs of existing efforts to help test Linux on laptops.
Below is effort by Benjamin Berg at Red Hat:
Fedora laptop testing - Main repository for tests
Linux laptop support
This section can be used to help expand to help keep track of Linux laptop support for different vendors with their own respective pages: