Re: laptop recommendation
On Wednesday 09 April 2003 2:14 pm, florian wrote:
> hi!
>
> im currently searching a nice laptop which works well
> with debian. basically it should have a at least 15" big
> screen and at least 1400x1050 px resolution..
>
> would be also great if it would not be too heavy and
> big.. anybody got an recommendation for that?
>
> do the pentium-m chips from intel work with debian/linux
> yet? is the wlan chip supported?
>
> thanks alot!
>
> ciao!
> florian
Hi,
I recently purchased a Sager 8886 from DiscountLaptops.com. It is
heavy, but has a 15.7" screen with a numeric keypad. You can now get a
Sager with a 16" screen. I have an ATI Mobility 9000 which is supposed
to be supported by XFree 8.3 (I am running 4.2 and using vesa driver).
This particular laptop has a 2.8 G P4 chip 1G of RAM and 2 hard drives.
The stock Debian kernel 2.4.20 supports everything on the laptop with
the exception of the windmodem. The tv tuner card works, the
detachable mp3 player works, the two hard drives work, sound, cd
burner, etc. No MS windows on this laptop.
I develop software and needed a fast computer with fast compile times
(Lots of c++ code). Most of the time, this is sitting on my desk at
home. Once a week, I take it up to work, so I don't mind the 12lbs +,
since I am not carrying it around much. The battery life is short (2
hours, but mine is always plugged in). It does generate a lot of heat,
but it sits on my desk 99.9% of the time, so this is not an issue.
The pros:
fast, has a lot of stuff that works right off the bat with Debian.
The cons:
heavy, short battery life, generates fair bit of heat.
It is my understanding that there are just a handful of laptop
manufacturers out there. Sager is one of them. I could have purchased
MS Windows but didn't have to and the purchase price was discounted.
Essentially this machine is a desktop replacement that is mobile enough
that I can take it places if I need to. I wouldn't want to be using
this on a plane, or have to carry it around all the time (which I
don't), so the limitations don't come up in my particular case.
I would have preferred a mac, since I am a 20+ year Apple guy, but for
my needs, this laptop is faster compiling my codes and running it. I
have a 466 Mhz G3 sitting right next to me and it is substantially
slower (greater than 4X) than my laptop in compilations and run time.
There was nothing on the market from Apple that had the characteristics
I needed.
John Schmidt
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