Re: Good Linux Laptop?

From: Bill Waddington (william.waddington_at_beezmo.com)
Date: 12/13/04 

Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 07:16:05 -0800

On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 22:52:14 -0500, General Schvantzkoph
<schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> wrote:

>On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 02:32:59 +0100, Kalevi Nyman wrote:

>> Which laptop is a good choice for using Linux?

>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.

General, this looks pretty good. How is the battery life?

I might quibble about the _much_ more expensive part, but can't argue
with the bang for the buck equation.

>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.

What used to be a minus for Centrino has become a plus with the advent
of ndiswrapper and the Intel ipw2100/2200 project.

I still like my ThinkPad, but I won't challenge you to a race any
time soon...

Bill 

-- 
William D Waddington
william.waddington@beezmo.com
"Even bugs...are unexpected signposts on
the long road of creativity..." - Ken Burtch

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