IBM ThinkPad T22 w/Linux Review

Augustus writes: "LinuxHardware.org has just posted the first review of IBM's ThinkPad T22 with the LinDVD software DVD player that was mentioned on Slashdot back in April. The T22 should finally be available to consumers and it's a fine piece of hardware at a decent price. The review covers the basics: software, support, price, and especially the hardware."

Comments

Winmodems...

[Gregoyle]

Funny how the review bellyaches about a Winmodem as a resource hog and a pain in the neck. I remember way back when (oh, maybe 6 months or a year ago?) if the modem was a winmodem, you didn't even bellyache about it being a resource hog. It just plain didn't work.

One thing I wonder about, though, is what kind of support comes with this laptop? Normally you don't get support from Corel unless you bought the product over the counter, and I wonder if IBM will give it's (Linux) laptop buyers the same kind of support as its desktop buyers. A lot of established Linux users scoff at using customer support, but that is the sort of thing that convinces businesses to buy, say, 500 units for their sales force.

Price

[Rogerborg]

• it's a fine piece of hardware at a decent price

Debate over the modem/LAN specification aside, if you're swapping a $400 (retail) M$ OS/office suite for a $30 (retail, with discs) Linux distro, then you've just bought yourself $370 of retail margin right there to spend on goodies, or to leverage at point of sale.

LinuxHardware.org /.

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you wondering as to whether the site actually goes down during a slashdot effect or not, I just thought that I'd let you know that the server has never died during a slashdot posting and that I simply do not have enough bandwidth on the site. We are currently looking for a hosting site to increase the available bandwidth from the measily 500kb connection we have now to at least enough to handle a slashdot. If you know of a hosting faqcility (preferably in the Atlanta area) that would be willing to donate bandwidth to the site please have them contact me at augustus@linuxhardware.org.

Thanks,
Augustus (LH.o Site Manager)

Slashdotted, alternative links, etc.

[Balinares]

Alright, so the site is slashdotted. I've found a short LinuxHardware article about LinDVD on ThinkPad in Google's cache. Here are the specs of that T22 beast on IBM's site.

... You know, I realize we'd need a Karma Whore moderation for certain posts, that mods the post up without giving the poster karma. Just an idea...

You call this a review???

[IceFox]

LinDVD is almost identical interface-wise to its WinDVD counterpart and should perform about the same on comparable hardware.

Ugg, talk about speaking out of your ass. Because the gui is the same means that everything else will be? Why would that be again? Speaking from first hand experiance (I was on the lsdvd team) the underlying code is entirly differenet. Heck other then the "skin" on the gui it to is probably a re-write too. There are many many spisific things that Linux is a part of that affects the end result that have nothing to do with the fact that it "has the same ui" The entire unerlayer (unless they ported direct show) is different then what was there before.

Where are the test disk? Motion menu's? Subpics? Stream tests? This is not a DVD player review by any means.

There is bit all about scsi vs ide. This is a very very moot point. It may be an issue under windows, but not linux. There is nothing special about saying that it can do both. Kinda like me saying I can boot off of both. Woopie.

The all important LinDVD performs quite well but not perfect. With most DVDs you will notice no difference from that of a standard hardware decoder but there are a few points on some "action-packed" movies that will skip a bit. Keep in mind that this is still a software DVD player on a laptop and the first iteration of the Linux version.
This is no excuse. They are running 2.4, A 900mhz machine and they are using video acceleration. Cough my 450 cough... Unless the problem is with pthreads (which it might be if they didn't fix that) I would say that they have some work to do.

So here are some real questions that I want to know about. How about macrovision? Is it there? Can you take screenshots? Is there an video out? How about the kernel. Does the dvd player use a spesific kernel to run? Can I upgrade to 2.4.9 without it blowing up? What about changing distrobution? Will it blow up then? Are only Cakdera linux 2.4 binaries provided? What about the defacto red hat 6.x?
What about CSS, I presume it is kernel mode. Does that app barf when you run gdb on it? Did you test out the player with a large number of dvd's to see if any of them would fail? What about region changing. How well does it support that? Do you have to mount the drive before playing? How much cpu does it use while watching your average film? Can it play files? Can it play vcd's? How about SVCD? Does it do Kariokee mode? Can it play regular pcm (wav) file streams? How does the audio sound on the laptop? Can you pump it out to real speakers? Can you run more then just the DVD player at once? Does the ui play frendly with the rest of the desktop (kde, gnome, etc) How fast can you fast forward it? Can you make it go slow? Can you frame advace? Do multiple angle's work? Can it handle cool things like the Ghostbusters msk3000 subpic overlay and not loss performace? Can it handle non-css content (i.e. porn). Can you use 2 cpu's?

Sigh this isn't a review this is just a add for linuxhardware.org