Choosing Hardware
Hi all,
I'm looking at buying my first ever brand new laptop, and I'm a bit
rusty when it comes to the available technology.
One of my main concerns is keeping at least my hardware drivers Free -
I'd rather not have firmware blobs either, but I can tolerate those if I
have to. I can also tolerate drivers that aren't in the standard kernel,
but again I'd rather not if possible.
If any/all of these questions can be best answered by existing websites,
I'm happy to be referred - though most of the ones I've seen are written
by people less picky about free software than I am, so it's a bit hard
to judge whether their solution will be acceptable to me.
Video:
>From what I can gather, if I want video to work properly with free
drivers, I should probably go with Intel. I know there are free drivers
for nVidia and ATI, but not for 3d or other useful features of newer
cards, is that right? How about others such as SiS? Are all Intel
chipsets supported equally well?
Wireless:
Again my understanding is that Intel will give me the best support -
again, are all Intel Wireless chipsets supported freely, or do I need to
pick the right one?
Audio:
Something I've never paid a huge amount of attention to; if sound
doesn't work I shrug my shoulders and carry on without it. But if I'm
splashing out on a new machine, it would be nice to have it going. What
should I be looking for here?
Others? I think just about any Ethernet (wired) NIC works fine, right?
Do I need to worry about power management, Cardbus (etc) drivers, memory
card slot drivers, TPM chips etc? Do they vary much in terms of
compatibility? I probably don't care too much about fingerprint
scanners. Bluetooth is important.
Given that most of the best supported chipsets seem to be Intel, I guess
that means I'm stuck with an Intel CPU - if they're providing the best
support to Linux, that's fine by me. Then I probably want to go with the
complete Centrino (or Santa Rosa?) package, is that right?
Are any particular manufacturers doing a better job than others at the
moment in terms of Linux support? I know that Dell are offering Linux on
some of their machines at the moment, but that offer has not reached New
Zealand yet. Anything I buy will have to be available here in NZ, which
may restrict things a bit, but I want any warranty issues to be easily
dealt with.
Two examples I've found that look quite nice are the Toshiba A8 and the
HP Compaq 6710b - the latter looks quite nice with its bigger (well,
higher res) screen, and being available from my preferred shop with 2GB
of RAM and 2.2GHz CPU. It seems to be available in slightly different
configurations, whether geographically or something else I don't know -
the local one I'm looking at seems to have Intel wireless, while others
I've seen in howtos have Broadcom. Anybody know if these are any good?
Anything else I need to look out for?
Many thanks,
Richard
Reply to: