Alexander Reelsen wrote:
If you think you might want to run compiz or have any need for hardware graphics accelleration think twice before you buy a laptop with an ATI graphics card. I have an HP Pavilion dv8000z with the ATI Radeon Xpress 200M and it will not work with the ATI drivers. Loading the fglrx driver at Xserver startup sends the cpu into a race condition that creates so much heat that the laptop will spontaneously reboot within less than a minute if I don't manually power off the system. I'm locked out of all the text consoles during that time also so there is no way to recover other than killing the system with the power switch. I'm not saying all the ATI cards will react that way, but if you want/need hardware accelleration be positive that the card being used will work with the ATI drivers before you purchase your laptop. Your chances of having an Nvidia card work with Nvidia's drivers are much better.Hi On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 15:30:49 -0800 Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org> wrote:On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 09:58:07AM +0100, stevendemetrius wrote:Have a look at this web site. http://tuxmobil.org/mylaptops.html I recommend IBM Thinpad with Etch.Anyone bought one of these lately? I need to replace my old Toshiba I use for home/travel and I'm looking at the T60 wide screen.I've got no experience with T-Series. I just got a R60 and it works like a charm until now. Haven't fiddled with the fingerprint reader yet, but it should work. You should check out http://www.thinkwiki.org - it's a really valuable ressource for Linux in combination with thinkpads. If you have further questions about the R60 (don't know, whether this is an alternative for you), feel free to mail me. Hope this helps. Regards, Alexander
I'm pretty bummed that I have a machine that is theoretically capable of runing things such as compiz or any 3D games, but I'm unable to because of ATI's lousy drivers, and the fact that the open source drivers don't give any hardware acceleration. As far as wireless goes you might steer clear of a laptop with Broadcom wireless chipset if you want to be able to use software such as Airsnort as the bcm43xx kernel module is still pretty limited. The only way the Broadcom chip will work with WPA is to use ndiswrapper and the Windows NDIS drivers. However, if you are comfortable with WEP or clear text authentication to your wireless AP then it's probably not that big of a deal. However, just beware that you still will need bcm43xx-fwcutter to extract the firmware from the Windows drivers before the bcm43xx module will work.
Now, I suspect that a part of my problems are caused by having a 64-bit cpu and the rest of the hardware being 32-bit, but that will probably be true of any other laptop with a 64-bit cpu too. I'm forced into running a 32-bit OS if I want wireless that starts with the OS. I can't use ndiswrapper in a pure 64-bit environment as the only Windows drivers available for the Broadcom chip are 32-bit and the 64-bit bcm43xx kernel module is something I've never gotten to work in any fashion.