Re: debian oriented laptot suggestions
On 13 Sep 2007, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> > I'd second this. I've got a Thinkpad Z61M. Very well made, but the ATI
> > video and the Broadcom wireless are both difficult to get going; also
> > the sound is a problem. They all do work but it is not fun.
>
> Get Intel wireless along with any thinkpad. Always. But don't expect drivers
> for less than one-year-old hardware to be fully stable and well supported,
> not even Intel always manages that. This is a golden rule, and applies to
> every hardware: as usual, the bleeding edge is not a wise place to be if you
> are not a driver developer.
>
> If you are lucky, the thinkpad will have proper e1000 ethernet instead of
> sort-of-ok tg3 ethernet (still, the tg3 found in thinkpads are fully
> supported by Linux, so it will work well anyway).
>
> ATI is getting fixed by AMD, fortunately. Don't get one of the new thinkpad
> with nVidia GPUs, go for Intel (immediate full Linux support with good open
> drivers) or ATI (good drivers are about one year away).
>
> But the thinkpad *firmware* in the new machines is still going to be trouble
> for about one year at the speed I am going with thinkpad-acpi.
>
> As for the sound, it is just the usual problem with very new hardware, and
> it has already been fixed upstream in ALSA AFAIK.
>
I made the mistake of reinstalling Sidux on my Z61M in the hope of
eliminating the unexplained NMI: 1 0 error (it didn't, but that's
another story ...) .
I now have ATI and sound working but not wireless and I'm not the only
one. I've installed firmware-iwlwifi, which is supposed to work. After
trying out all kinds of things in /etc/networking/interfaces, the best I
get is repeated failed attempts to make a connection, plus "wmaster0:
unknown hardware address type 801" (repeated twice). It's lucky that at
least the wired connection still works.
Anthony
--
Anthony Campbell - ac@acampbell.org.uk
Microsoft-free zone - Using Linux Gnu-Debian
http://www.acampbell.org.uk (blog, book reviews,
on-line books and sceptical articles)
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