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LinuxCertified LC2430 Laptop Review
Anonymouse writes "OSNews posted a comprehensive review of the made-for-Linux LinuxCertified LC2430 laptop. They found that all its components are fully compatible with Linux, except with ACPI in recent kernels (which actually affects many laptops recently). The laptop is a desktop replacement with strong performance and some good extra features: Firewire port, 3-1 card reader, combo drive, SXGA+ TFT screen and an ATi Radeon 3D card. Four Linux distributions were tested with it."
I have an Alienware Area-51m laptop with a P4.
While the battery life does suck, the performance is awesome for a laptop.
I think the Pentium M would be better if you don't do anything serious with your laptop (or play Doom 3).
LinuxCertified is their name? Certified by whom - their marketing department? Wouldn't older, more popular models on eBay be cheaper and more compatible, since they've been around longer and have been tested by a larger population?
Aren't thse LinuxCertified laptops kind of expensive compared to competing laptops? I got my virtually silent Mac laptop for less than a grand months ago. If you're not going to be running Windows, then get something better. If you're going to be running Windows, then get something better. Sounds like a Lose-lose for LinuxCertified.
In other words, it tries to be just as big, hot, and power hungry as a desktop... While being cramped, using propritary parts, and being just as expensive as a notebook.
Wonderful! The worst of both worlds.
Seriously, folks. What is the point of desktop replacements? Who in the world buys them? What possible purpose can they serve?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
But it still will not give me what I need. And I think many others out there have the same needs (yeah mod me redundant for saying it again :)):
- WORKING ACPI support (it's a laptop, right?);
- Most importantly: a decent reference manager.
Lots of potential Linux users are scientists and they may even make up some really critical mass. But as long as we science types all have to use Lyx and LaTeX to handle bibkiographies (and yes, I know about sixpack and pybliographer - I tried everything to get them running on three different *NIX platforms but no go - maybe I'm stupid but I gave up for lack of time), instead of just grabbing EndNote for Linux and use it to insert references into OpenOffice we're not going to use Linux (or any other OSS OS) on a daily basis. Science these days is about content creation as much as anything else and in my experience OSS isn't very good about that yet. And Lord knows I tried. And don't tell me I have to use a Mac then. I USE a mac every day (PB G4 w/ 1GB RAM) and its performance is piss-poor when browsing and opening pdf's and the like, which is what I do all day. Windows is way faster at those tasks on comparable machines. Having Linux certified laptops is a decent first step, but it will not do for those who really need their laptops for actual work - see the above. Until that time comes I'm going to get me a really fat Voodoo laptop with XP to write my papers and make my figures (yes, I'm disappointed with the Mac's performance. I hate to switch but speed is everything these days).
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Remember that before ATI began releasing any drivers at all for Linux they released the specifications of their chipsets and even gave cards to developers who wrote open source drivers.
Look in your kernel config under Direct Rendering Infrastructure.
Well, I got it working (3D acceleration, I mean). Eventually. I have a Thinkpad A21p with a rage mobility m3. The DRI drivers work, but you need to download daily snapshots (there doesn't appear to be a 'stable'), cross your fingers and hope that it works. If it doesn't (it locks up hard - there's a kernel module involved) then you try yesterdays build. Even now, if there's an OpenGL screensaver that kicks in, Xv breaks, but that's pretty good as far as I'm concerned.
A much better outcome than on my desktop machine. ATI's radeon drivers - they suck.
God, I hate you ATI, you've wasted literally weeks of my time with your crap software. Linux certified, yeah right. This Radeon 9800SE card came with a linux logo on the box. Ha!
Bah, get an IBM Thinkpad. They're superior, cost about the same amount (or as little as half as much), come with a standard 3-year full parts warranty, have customer-replaceable parts (they ship you the easily-replaceable part, you replace it, and ship the broken one to them), don't use shitty and unstable hardware, have high-quality keyboards (I'm sure you've seen some shitty, untypeable laptop keyboards before) and all work with linux perfectly (in all cases I've seen, and ot the best of my knowledge).
I prefer the X series - they've got good battery life (4+ hours for P-M based models), weigh hardly anything (my P3-M X30 weighs 3.4lb - I'm typing on it now), and are well built and sexy. IBM Thinkpads have the geek appeal, minus the goddamn trendy/yuppy factor that powerbooks have that results in every idiot art geek coming up to you to start a conversation. That, and IBM kit have always had techie appeal in general - they're well built and don't fail.
Oh, and IBM at least supports Linux commercially, as opposed to this company which seems to want support from the Linux community. Ie, milk the community with shitty products.
In my opinion, the best thing you could do to get a quality laptop manufacturer to produce "made for Linux" laptops would be to buy an IBM laptop, and then write their corporate office and tell them that you really, really appreciate their high-quality laptop hardware, and that you only wish you weren't required to pay for Windows. If you're in charge of a network install base (and in association, the responsibility of making choices on kit - I know, this is slashdot, that's a bit of a stretch) or any other situation where money is involved, let them know - they'd likely care a good deal that their customers aren't entirely satisfied with their products.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Modern processors don't just have higher clock speeds--they have higher bus speeds as well, so RAM access is much faster. So moving to a celeron 500 would be a bigger jump than just 3 ghz to 500 mhz.
What about a really fast processor with a huge bus speed, but radically underclocked? This would solve a lot of heat and power issues at the same time, and wouldn't reduce performance as much.
In fact, I doubt performance would be affected too much at all. If the system used a small form factor (2.5") SATA hard drive instead of a notebook drive, it could run the hdd at 10k rpm.
Or am I crazy?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Hmm... this benchmark is a bit odd. They got 96.8FPS at 640x480 with the 2.8PM. They got 87.8 with the A64 4000 (Asus A8V).
Now, with the EXACT SAME VIDEO CARD, and with the same amount and type of RAM, PCStats (hey, it was the first thing I found when googling for A64 4000+ OC reviews) got 110FPS on an NF3, and 108.7GPS on a VIA chipset, both at stock. OCed (to 2.72GHz, from 2.4), they got 117.1 on the VIA.