Re: laptop and Debian
On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 01:26:29PM +0100, marc wrote:
Gerard Robin said...
> Hello,
> I intend to buy a laptop. I googled to find some information about laptops
> which support linux Debian and the informations that I got concerned fairly
> old laptops and no one works fine at 100%.
>
> Can someone give me some advices or give me a link to find some informations
> about recents laptops.
>
> I would like that thee things work fine:
I can give you a bit of feedback on my recent install on a Fujitsu P7120
> Xwindow
Working fine, but took some hand tweaking to get the full 1280x768
resolution and acceleration. X seems to be having some installation
issues at the moment, so that probably applies to a lot of systems...
> modem
Havn't tried yet. Didn't seem to work 'out of the box'
> ethernet card
Fine - worked out of the box.
> usb
Also fine.
> wifi
You have to source the downloadable firmware yourself (license issues),
but once installed, the Debian driver works.
> power sleep
Havn't messed with this yet.
> printer
Not usually a problem, but I suppose it depends on your printer and
how you connect it. The P7120 has no IR or parallel port. But a PP
can be added via a USB adapter. I normally print from my laptop using
the network via a desktop.
In hind sight, the one thing I really regret no researching in advance is
the DVD drive. So far I have not found any 'multi-region' firmware
updates for the Matsushita UJ-832 drive it uses, which makes it pretty
useless as a DVD movie player if your DVD collection is as regionally
diverse as mine is (or if you want to use it while travelling). Which
is a disappointment, because I was hoping the notebook upgrade would
save me from having to carry a separate DVD player when travelling...
The salesperson claimed to be able to make it multi-region, but I later
realised that they had just installed some Windows shareware program.
I don't know if it works on windows, but it certainly doesn't help
with Linux, so it doesn't help me :-/
I think the Sony VIO uses the same DVD drive, and there is a firmware
update on the Sony web site which claims to multi-region it. If I had
known this in advance, I probably would have gone for the Sony over
the Fujitsu.
My lesson for the future is to always carry a few move DVD's from from
a couple of different regions, as well as the Linux LiveCD, when shopping
for laptop/notebooks to make sure I don't fall victim to this
regionalization con.
If anyone knows of any way around this for my drive, please let me know.
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
Reply to: