Re: Laptop Shopping Questions

[Clive Menzies <clive@clivemenzies.co.uk>]

On (16/05/06 01:24), Scarletdown wrote:
> I'm finally shopping for a decent laptop, and will of course be putting
> Debian on it.  There is one in particular that I have in mind that seems
> to have a pretty decent bang for the buck; the Acer Aspire
> AS5003WLMi-XPH.
> 
> However, since I am buying via mail order instead of locally, I am
> obviously unable to give it a test drive with a live CD distro like
> Mepis or Knoppix.
> 
> Here's the specs on it...
> 
> 
> http://ostg.pricegrabber.com/search_techspecs_full.php/masterid=17993603
> 
> 
> Would this be suitable for a Debian notebook?  Also, what with it having
> an AMD 64 bit CPU, I would most likely want to run a 64 bit kernel.  Are
> there a decent amount of apps available for 64 bit Linux?  I
> particularly need stuff like OpenOffice, Firefox, Evolution, GAIM, GIMP,
> XINE, etc (the usual package of stuff for a general purpose system).
> Are there 64 bit versions of these available?  And if not, will the
> 32-bit versions work on a 64 bit architecture?

I've got a 1524WLMi (AMD64 3400) and I've got two sid systems, ubuntu and
kubuntu on it.  Everything works fine although I installed a chroot
32bit system for open office and flash in firefox.  The 64bit
applications work fine and I did get wireless networking working but I
seem to have broken it at the moment.

Setting up the chroot was pretty straightforward following the howto:
https://alioth.debian.org/docman/view.php/30192/21/debian-amd64-howto.html#id220463

I've had over-heating problems which mainly seem to be related to CD
activity (I abandoned ripping CD's).  The Turion should be less
susceptible to overheating but someone wrote to me recently saying they
had a similar experience with a Turion based Acer.  The other
downside is battery life but as I tend to use this laptop as a
workstation, not a problem for me.

I think the machine is great and works hard..... and 64bit is kind of
fun ... another dimension to get to grips with :)

Regards

Clive

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