Re: Which Desktop replacement.
On Tue, 21 May 2002, Derek Broughton wrote:
> No flames from me. That pretty much sums it up - price vs. quality. Not a
> big difference either way, but Dell IS renowned for bad BIOSes. What's the
> status of IBM support for Linux in the retail market, these days? Dell
They actually ship some laptops with a distro on: I forget which -
even if you use a different distro, this is worth grabbing as you can
snaffle any kernel params or binary-only programs that come with.
( The one that catches presses of the thinkpad button comes to mind:
apparently one of the more deranged bits of IBM has decided that
it would be damaging to IBMs intellectual property to tell us how
that button works. )
I didn't get linux with my A20p, because they weren't shipping at the
time, but I'd definitely buy one again - great keyboard, nice mouse
replacement (a rubber-nipple-thingy as opposed to a trackpad), great
screen, and nice keyboard (for a laptop). Oh, and 3 mouse buttons.
The one thing you need to be careful about is the graphics chipset -
they do get supported after a while, but I had to wait a couple of
months before mine became widely supported. (I had to hybridise a
debian-woody Xfree package with Xfree CVS till tyhat happened) - this
is typically only a problem for the brand-shiny-new thinkpads - older
models should be fine. Oh - and if you need a modem, make sure you
get the mini-pci card with the modem that works, not the bizarre
winmodem thingy that doesn't. (Don't remember which was which - don't
use one myself).
--
"Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing
that way."
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