Re: Good Linux Laptop?
From: General Schvantzkoph (schvantzkoph_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/13/04
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Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 22:52:14 -0500
On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 02:32:59 +0100, Kalevi Nyman wrote:
> Dear Sirs!
>
> Which laptop is a good choice for using Linux?
> By looking trough several reviews I can't figure
> it out. Most reviews concentrate on installation
> but that is not what I want to know. Maybe I'm too
> picky on this but I'm sure that you fellows have
> some own experience and can give me an advice
> or two.
>
> Yours
>
> Kalevi Nyman
> ---
I have a Compaq R3000z AMD64 laptop which works fine with Fedora Core 2
and 3 (both 32 bit and 64 bit versions) but not with Mandrake 10.1. If you
want speed then the Athlon 64 is the only way to go. My benchmarking
(doing Verilog simulation and FPGA place and routes) shows the Athlon 64
3400+ in my laptop to be almost exactly twice the speed of my 2.66GHz
Xeon, i.e. equivalent to a 5.2GHz Xeon if such a thing existed. It's
also reasonably inexpensive, I paid around $1500 for an A64 3400+, 1G
RAM, 60G disk, 802.11G wireless and XP Pro (I don't use XP much except
for to download my GPS but I figured that since I had to buy a copy
with this laptop I'd get the version that worked rather than XP home
which has crippled networking). You'll find that a Centrino based laptop
is much more expensive and it will be slower.
The Broadcom 54G 802.11b/g wireless chip works with Ndiswrapper but only
on a 32 bit kernel (because the XP driver is a 32 bit driver), there is no
native Linux driver. Wireless is a huge problem for Linux. There are some
chips that have native Linux drivers but many don't. The Broadcom chip is
in a lot of laptops at the moment and it does work with Ndiswrapper but
that involves doing a little work to set it up everytime you install a new
distribution. I have the 1680x1050 display, the configuration tools for
Fedora Core 3 don't competely understand it so you have to do some hand
editing of the xorg.conf file but it works. If I had it to do over I would
have gone with a smaller screen, the big screen makes the laptop a little
bulky. A number of brands of laptops are using this screen, as well as the
even bigger 1920x1200. My recommendation is to choose a smaller screen.
I'd also get a 100G disk if I were buying it today. The 100G drive had a
huge premium over the 60G disk when I bought my system a few months ago,
that premium has dropped in half since then.
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