Re: Please advise me...
Cecil wrote:
I will be buying a new laptop for school. I would like to wipe windows off and
put just debian on. I need a laptop that linux has full support for. I plan
to make this purchase within the next 2 months. Can anyone advise me? The
only other alternative is buying an apple ibook and they are pretty pricy.
The main performance/efficiency bottleneck for Firefox/Thunderbird,
Openoffice.org and the GNOME and KDE desktop environments and
applications is initial load time.
So be sure to get at least 1GB of RAM. A 1.2Ghz or 1.5Ghz Pentium M
processor will do fine once applications are loaded.
Then, rather than closing those monster applications or rebooting, you
just suspend to disk, and resume. You should be able to be up and
working for what is (should be) a power off state in less than 30 seconds.
And so that brings me to my point. The most important thing for a laptop
intended to run linux is that ACPI works and suspend-to-disk (whether
that is software, or bios-helped) functions properly.
Absolutely, your laptop's power management must be compatible with at
least software suspend to disk under Linux.
If you can include suspend-to-disk and resume into your regular usage
pattern, you can go for one of this ultra portable 1.2Ghz or 1.5Ghz x86
laptops.
I recommend against a "performance" laptop. The most important things
for an education laptop purchase is portability/mobility and battery life.
The 15.4", 1600x1200 screens on Dells are very nice, but when you have
~2-2.2hour (tops) real world battery life, it isn't worth it.
Also, and trust me on this, you don't want your fans blowing away at
high speed in a small lecture room. It irritates everyone else, and
irritates you while you're at it. Fortunately I was able to keep my fan
usage to a minimum by tweaking thermal behavior with the i8k (Dell
laptop) kernel module.
But in my experience, you will get significantly WORSE battery/thermal
performance under Linux than Windows, and much more so if you plan to
run something like GNOME 2.6 or KDE.
When running top in your terminal emulator causes 4-6% constant CPU
usage, you know you have a case of bloat on your hands.
dircha
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