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VIA Introduces A New Laptop Motherboard
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 $800 cost I can see this one selling pretty well. And they would have a great mobile media system if they added a hardware DivX decoder on top of the hardware DVD decoder. :) And now that the Linux drivers are starting to mature and the sources are finally starting to come out, by the time this is released to the U.S. market it should be a great little Linux laptop."
Via CPU + Linux = Sweet stuff. Seriously, it's about time there was an inexpensive Linux Laptop. I might even consider getting it instead of a new mini-ITX system. Whee!
And I don't even have XVideo, which would speed up decoding (it does a part of divx/dvd decoding in hardware, namely colorspace conversion and scaling). The current VIA mobos have XVideo support in XFree86 CVS, IIRC.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
But I'd like to see a lot more of it. If open source software continues to team up with distributers and hardware manufacturers like this they could be well on their way to being viable M$ competition. If little johnny asks his dad for a computer it's going to be a tough job for M$ to convince johnny's daddy to buy him a windows computer for an extra $200(rough cost of OEM operating system license and office license?) when the linux machine boasts all the same features. M$ has ridden the coattails of every manufacturer in the world shipping a license of Windows/Office with every computer they sell for long enough. Now all they need is to work out a few more kinks and get some advertisement going.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
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.
I understand that this laptop mentioned doesnt require active cooling, but as it seems everyone is focusing on wow an $800 linux laptop I went to go see what $800 could buy you at dell..
2ghz celeron 20gb hd 256mb ram 14" screen... for $749
While i haven't ever owned one of these i've not had a problem getting linux on dell laptops in the past. If you are looking for an inexpensive laptop to run linux it seems to me you could do a lot better than a very underpowered core processor such as the via.
*ahem*
Don't have too nice a day.