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VIA Introduces A New Laptop Motherboard

Posted by timothy on from the treasuring-diversity dept.

arrasmith writes "It looks like there is going to be an upgrade to that non-expensive $800 Linux laptop. VIA just came out with a new laptop motherboard based on the faster Nehemiah core for the C3. You can get all the specs at the Antaur homepage. If they stay near the $800 cost I can see this one selling pretty well. And they would have a great mobile media system if they added a hardware DivX decoder on top of the hardware DVD decoder. :) And now that the Linux drivers are starting to mature and the sources are finally starting to come out, by the time this is released to the U.S. market it should be a great little Linux laptop."

2 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Finally... by Kai_MH · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Via CPU + Linux = Sweet stuff. Seriously, it's about time there was an inexpensive Linux Laptop. I might even consider getting it instead of a new mini-ITX system. Whee!

  2. Yes, it is! by Fefe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Try running Linux 2.5 on an nForce. What, no network driver? Well, who needs one of those these days, right? Or even try running *BSD!

    I own an nvidia graphics card and am happy with it because some lunatics ported the nvidia driver to the 2.5 kernels. But the nforce users are pretty much lost.

    Intel chipsets tend to be well supported as well, but let me mention these: "Winmodem" and "Centrino Wiress LAN". Good luck running OpenBSD on one of those. Apart from that, Intel chipsets are expensive and historically never performed well, especially on notebooks.

    If I had to buy a new computer tomorrow, I would only even consider VIA and SiS. Both chipset companies are usually well supported by Linux and BSD, and their hardware is supported as soon as it is on the market. With Intel, you usually have to wait a few years until the hardware is obsolete and then Intel will release some driver under some non-GPL license (see the e100 driver for Linux, which was only recently released as GPL).

    VIA and SiS may not be the highest performance chipsets around, but they work well, have absolutely no stability issues (except maybe under Windows) and are well supported. And "well supported" outweighs anything else anyway. I'm too old to run around in circles around nvidia or Intel, begging for even a binary only driver to get my machine to work at all.