Slashdot Mirror
Follow-Up On TuxTops
Some of you may remember the TuxTops story concerning their exit from the laptop business. We've heard from QLITech regarding their acquisition of the TuxTops line -- it's good to see someone will still make it. [Update: 02/22 03:08 PM EST by michael : Newsforge has a story. Looks like QLITech will be taking over support of TuxTops' customers as well - good.]
thankfully someone will be making linux laptops still
I hope they can have a successful business. I have said before that those who use Linux know how to use it and don't always need "special" anything to run it. I have a friend who is extremely well versed in Linux and runs it on a Dell Laptop without any problems. I know that this isn't the companies only source of income but I do hope it becomes a decent source of income. Who knows, the open-sourcers of the world might go with them just because they are making an effort.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
... /me wants an Emporer. Obsidian was a cooler name though. Now if only VA Linux stock would go back up so I could afford to blow $3K...
I go to the same LUG meeting as the owner :) GO RAY!
sorry this is my closest brush with fame.
Klowner
Ever bootstrap a Chinstrap penguin?
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
Ah yea. I am looking forward to this. Running Linux on a laptop is too difficult. I have a two year old laptop, and when I tried to install Linux, I have too many issues to make it viable. Dual booting isn't really an option either; I have a 6GB hard drive. Also, the hardware tends (at least in my experience) to be less supported in a laptop then in its desktop cousins. Having a professional company contor the laptop specs to make it Linux complient would be great. Having them ship the computer with Linux is even better. Perhaps this will expand Linux use? Open source?
----------------------
Kurt A. Mueller
kurtm3@bigfoot.com
PGP key id:0x4FB5FB1D
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
The Emperor & The King
I don't know about the rest of you, but I think these have got to be the most pretentious names I've ever seen.
And what is up with "The Chinstrap". I'm no fan of the other two, but atleast "The Prince" would make a little more sense and not sound so ridiculously stupid.
"Hey whatcha got there?"
"Oh this is my new laptop, its a Chinstrap."
"Umm...yeah right. Later man"
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Good. Remember the few moments that Dell was supposed to offer Linux machines. Didn't see much come out of that. Now I can get a good machine running Linux without much work (duct taping the crack in the case and the such, heh).
(here goes my karma)
But really, I wonder if the cart is coming before the horse in this scenario. Is linux really a reasonable portable operating system. Sure, I boot ppc on my powerbook, and it looks really cool and stuff, but it's not useful to me on a day to day basis. I would hope any company marketing portables is putting alot of effort into building applications that make them viable. Perhaps I'm just being too closed minded.
tcd004
The guts of the Penitum 4!
don't click here unless you want stock photos
there prices are way too high. I thought that one of the good points of hardware vendors using Linux was so that they could drop the price. From what I've seen so far, it always seems that a system with Linux pre-installed always cost more than a comparable system with Windows pre-installed. It's as if the vendors are saying, "Pay us extra, 'cause we 'support' Linux." No thanks.
I can put together a box myself from peices for less than what they're charging. So, their business plan is to enter a market composed of people capable and willing to building their own systems. They don't offer a considerable discount over the BigBrand guys, and their only distinguishable selling point is "IT HAS LINUX". My prediction is that they will follow TuxTops to the bottom of the heap before the year is out.
BTW, what happened to the idea of building a business out of providing custom distributions? Now that would be useful and a better business model than overpriced hardware.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
There are others, too.
Werner Heuser, the author of the Linux Laptop Howto and several other helpful Lapop-related documents about Linux, runs a little business in Germany for Linux-Laptops. You can have a look at www.xtops.de if you're interested.
(I'm not affiliated with Werner, I just contributed parts of the Howto and wrote the old Battery Powered Linux Howto that he took over and rewrote.)
------------------
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
i'm running redhat 6.2 on a dell inspiron 8000 as my primary machine at the office - and i LOVE it!
i use it as our test server and my personal workstation. i can even take it with me and work from home when i get burnt out at the office.
tcd004
That's what I forgot in my other response to your question: I'm a freelancer developer and (still, but not very long anymore) a student. I can bring and take my work with me wherever I go to. My laptop is about 1.2 kg, so I don't have to carry a big bulky heavy bag with me, yet still I have 12 gigs of harddisk space and it's fast enough, too. You can see the obvious advantages having a Linux laptop means for me.
------------------
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
I really don't see any reason anyone would buy these laptops. I mean, yeah, it's great, another company "supporting" linux. But check the "full disclosure" bit:
These laptops have softmodems, which aren't supported ("There is no Linux support for this softmodem (yet), but it works in Windows"), or may have experimental support, but they're not willing to support them ("It is frankly more cost-effective for us to ignore this hardware and consider it useless").
All three machine's sound chips are supported by experimental early-stage drivers (the chinstrap's audio "skips occasionally, hangs occasionally, and loops occasionally. It may react badly to APM events. Sound recording does not work at all.") The emperor and the king's sound chips are supported by binary-only drivers.
The emperor has a problem where it always suspends when you close the laptop, the chinstrap's video hardware is only supported in X by means of a binary-only experimental beta driver.. And even in the full-disclosure bit, they don't seem to tell you who manufactures these machines. Certainly they're not building themselves, or they'd use linux-compatible hardware.
Plus, they all appear to be MORE expensive than equivlant laptops with windows installed. Hows that?
Blatant ad Check out Emporer Linux They sell mainstream laptops (sony, toshiba, whatever) with linux on them for a few extra bucks. I know the people who run the shop, very professional, and very good. /Blatant ad
It would be nice to get Linux pre-installed on a laptop, hopefully with some options of what distro, what you want in it, etc. Hopefully there would be a selection of *supported* hardware that you could include as options.
I managed to put a Linux distro on my laptop after my hard drive crashed, and corrupted the windows system directory (Grrrrr... not really blaming windows for a bad drive, but windows did lock up on me like that was its freakin' job). It took some work, but the relatively generic hardware in my laptop took to Linux very well. Since I solved the PCMCIA modelm problem (thank you, sourceforge) all is right with the universe.
The beauty of the machine is that it works, everything on it is free, and it has provided a great learning experience. Who could ask for more?
Honestly, how many of us are in computers because they are easy, and come with pre-packaged hold-your-hand-and-don't-let-go OS's? It's all about tinkering, and the challenge of "hey, what happens if I delete this?" Whoops... time to reinstall... damn.
The two best teachers are Pain and Loss of Money. Admit it... there's a little Masochist in all of us.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
1.) On an airplane - No net access so you can watch DVD's (yep you can watch DVD's in linux), Play games or type whatever you need to type.
2.) In the car when driving you can listen to mp3's
3.) At home or in the office there is nothing a laptop can't do that a desktop can ... trust me.
Now if you've ever tried to install linux on a laptop you will find that with everything built into the mother board and lack of room to tinker with the insides ... that installing linux is not the easiest thing to do.
Solution ... instead of buying a laptop with windows pre-installed ... get linux pre-installed ... and QLITech offers this ...
And if you must have windows I am quite sure that QLITech would set you up with a dual-booting system.
So I am more than pleased to see that TuxTops legacy is still alive and not to mention all previously supported computers are still supported through QLITech ... they could have easily just taken over the notebook section, but they stayed with the commitment of TuXtops.
Lastly ... about the names ... have you not noticed the names of notebooks these days ... Protege, Satellite, iBook, or iPaq ... come on these names are no more absurd than any otherrs ... at least there's reasoning behind their names.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
So if they come out with an ultralight should they call it the Fairy or the Blue?
-- fencepost
fencepost
just a little off
Given that someone wanting to run linux on a laptop has a clue about linux. Why would I buy a laptop that has unsupported hardware in it? I can buy a Dell that works 100%, or a Sony that works 100% (if you get the right model) for the same or less money. Granted I wouldn't be paying the Microsoft Tax, but if I Pay the tax and end up spending less money.... I'll pay the tax.
Except for some more obscure laptops, many have no problem running Linux (Even compaq!).
I hope they can get a better supplier for their laptops, maybe a design that is higher quality with some quality hardware instead of unsupported low-quality made in china systems.
tuxTops could have been big, IF the laptops were made from premium components, not knock-off parts.
(How about a well supported 3d video chipset, well supported audio,(serial,irda,usb,etc......)
only my opinion though.... I wont be buying anything they are offering. I need better quality.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We've seen a lot of concern about the price and quality of the Linux Laptops We are offering.
There is *NO* way that we would be carrying these units if they were junk, (I know the definition of Junk is vague).
The King and Emperor are made by a company called Compal, who makes most of Dell's laptops.
As a matter of fact, the Emperor, and the Dell Inspiron 5000e are the *SAME* unit.
The Chinstrap is a cranky unit, we will admit. That unit is made by ASUS, (Yes the same company that makes motherboards)
Tuxtops used to offer dual boot options on their laptops, something which we dumped for the most part a long, long time ago, henece the reason why some of these units have some unsupported/semi-supported hardware.
As for price, we seem to be in line with everyone else, however we are more concerned about quality, and reliability, than price. take a look at our systems..... Certainly not no-name junk parts (ASUS, Creative, ATI, Matrox)
I hope this may clear any questions the Slashdot crowd may have about these laptops. If you have a concern, e-mail us, please. We've been doing this for almost three years now, and we wouldn't be where we are at if we didn't listen to our customers.
"In an open world, who needs windows or gates?" (tm)
for those of that use *nix on a daily basis for our work, a laptop that *doesn't* run *nix just isn't very useful.
:)
Fortunaely, due to the weird rules about faculty startup money, and since I'm also getting a real workstation, by boss is transmogrifying my startup pc into a laptop--which means I can continue work at home, even if only the editing (no, there's no laptop with the computational power I need
It runs just fine on my thinkpad 755c--a 486 laptop with 20M and a 340M hard drive.
The sound doesn't work for linux, but I understand that If i'd boot into dos first, then start linux from there it would work until sleep set in--but who needs sound???
Just today, I was putting in for a quote on some IBM Thinkpad A21s from CDW, and noticed that CDW is now carrying Thinkpads in a wide variety of configurations preloaded with Caldera instead of Windows.
For a while now, Dell has been selling certain models direct as a special order this way, but this is the first I've seen of national distribution of Linux laptops through major resellers. And IBM makes mighty fine laptops with very nice tech, like bright screens, passthru ethernet and modem (indeed, passthru everything) on the docks and port replicators, reinforced door hinges and so on.
There's still some (rapidly dwindling) value to a company that makes tweaked, optimized Linux servers and workstations. But if you can get Linux fully supported from the major vendors on their best hardware at prices that beat the specialty vendors (who are just rebadging no-name Chinese laptops anyway), what's the point?
I'll bet IBM's return and repair services are better than the little guys', too.
A hand to the ALITech folks for picking up a good line of hardware and running with it.
After hemming and hawing and drooling over Jim's Obsidian 30 for about six months, I picked up an Amethyst 20U before trekking down under. OK, so I wiped the default RH install and slathered a real distro (Debian Potato/testing) on it.
The box has been a champ. With docking station, it's virtually a second desktop. Sans, it's a thin, light, powerhouse. Battery life is good (close on the 3:20 advertised), screen rocks, keyboard feel is great (packed a Happy Hacker keyboard, hardly used it). Onboard networking is very nice to have. Still need to try out the FIR, and I've had trouble getting PCMCIA up and running, but that's after wiping what TuxTops had given me. Power management works, though it helps to go to standby from console. Had to throw together a presentation -- plug video out to the pojector, hit the <FN><CRT/LCD> switch, and voila. Coulda saved myself a lot of worrying on that one... ;-)
One nit -- the screen tends to rub against the touchpad and mouse keys in the closed position, I've found it helps to keep a sheet of letter-sized paper inside the case when closed for travelling. Otherwise, very happy.
Yes, the pricing is comperable to (or slightly better than) Compaq and Dell boxes, and better than IBM. Yes, there are cheaper boxes out there, but they tend to do less or have less coverage. And, yes, if you're familiar with Linux, it's a perfectly acceptable portable OS. My alternative bet would likely be something based on Symbian for instant-on and ready-to-fly systems. Windows? A joke.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I spec'ed out with the Emperor with an 850 chip and a DVD drive -- nothing else. Just over $2900 out the door.
Perusing the web to see what comparable buys were out there, first thing that I note (and probably obvious) I see nothing from IBM/Sony that spec out close for under $3500.
Toshiba has a Wi-Fi unit that's lacking the DVD, but has wireless and is comparable in price
Compaq has some units that are probably the most comparable (lacking in video capabilites) but are a bit less expensive.
Overall though, prices on these are great! -- right on the money -- and I put through an order for the Emperor!
Is there anybody out there who uses Solaris 8 on a laptop? Is there a commercial vendor who will sell laptops with Solaris pre-installed?
Galactic Geek
* * * Free programmers? Why not? http://www.Geeks4Free.com * * *