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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."
Great, but does it run Windows XP?
*ducks*
Actually, the prices looked extremely reasonable enough that I'm considering a purchase. The LC2410 is only $1499. The 2430, the one in the review, is only $1699.
I'm rather impressed they can have prices this reasonable, "Windows tax" or not. A similar Dell Inspiron 5160 (a "desktop replacement" as well) configured with WinXP runs around the same price ($1640, though they are offering a free wireless card now).
How fast does it compile Gentoo?
the P4 is the WORST possible cpu for a notebook. It needs massive memory bandwidth to perform somewhat acceptible, which most notebooks dont have. It draws a LOT of power, killing the battery rather quickly (90 min run time is pathetic), and all that dissapated power has to go somewhere (aka heat). The Pentium M or Athlon 64 series would of been a far better choice for a notebook.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
It looked like then "special" price was higher than the "normal" price, then I looked again:
The price appeared as $1099 (struckout) and $1699 as the "special" price. I guess "0" and "8" look similar if they have are struck through.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I recognize that laptop case from when we used to sell them at my last job. They were notorious for the hinges breaking very easily under repeated openings of the display. Be wary of weak components!
This is a joke, right? Linux-certified laptop, no ACPI support?
ACPI support is absolutely essential on a laptop.
ahr, wrong...it's true that if the voltage does fall below a certain level copper would start deposit on the electrode, and the li-ion can never be recharged again, but all laptop uses Lithium-ion battery now a day, the "smart" battery tech built-in automatically takes that into consideration. So 0% doesn't not necessary mean the battery is completely empty, just mean it's near the recharging voltage limit. If i remember correctly apple actually recommends ipod users to drain the battery till the device "die" once every few months.
As for many other types of rechargeable batteries, it's actually better to discharge them completely before recharging, because of the so called "memory" effect.
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
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
all of the athlon models run at a much lower speed when on battery power. and they're equally as power hungry as a pentium IV.
Pentium M and Efficeon are the only sane choices for x86 notebook cpus.
Review says: sleep doesn't work, bad placing of the PCMCIA card slot wrt the optical drive, and a funny sound card. When the battery gets to 10%, it just shuts off, instead of sleeping--which I guess is related to the first issue. I have to say, that as noble an attempt as this is, if I purchased a new computer with any of these issues I would send it back. Is it right to cut them this much slack? Oh, and it's 7 pounds and get 1.5 hrs of usage. Let's compare to an iBook:
So the reviewed laptop costs $300 more, + wireless card, and sleep doesn't work? Plus the HD is smaller, weighs a pound more, and gets 1/3 of the battery life? You can put Linux on the iBook, even, if you don't like the UNIX part of OS X.
While there's a place for Linux on a laptop, I don't see this as an iBook killer. Get it below $999 and I'd be interested--if you're going to pay a premium I think this laptop has some competition.
--
$tar -xvf
Actually, they don't say. All they say is it's certified for Linux, and we all know that "being certifiable" just means you're crazy...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It feels to me that this review is a little biased. For example, the authoer says that this notebook shuts down "sometimes without warning" if the batteries get too low, and he says that this is a good thing! I can't imagine this "feature" succeeding on a more mainstream laptop...
The laptop's integrated Radeon chipset works with the GPL'd r200 drivers that come with Xorg.
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.
I had one of these. At first I couldn't be happier - it was awesome that all the components worked with linux, and when ordering it you can ask them to partition the hard drive however you like (so you don't need partition magic to put something else on it - you can tell them to leave an unused partition for you to put something else on later), but then I discovered one really dissapointing problem with it: On the physical quality side of things, it is extremely fragile. For one thing, some screws came loose inside that part of the case that you aren't allowed to open without voiding the warranty - I could hear the screws rolling around in there, but to fix it I'd have to mail the thing back in since I'd void the warranty, and that would be a huge delay and I *needed* this thing daily. So I decided to wait until it was out of warranty anyway, and then open it up to fix it myself. If anything broke while it was under warranty, then I'd ship it in.
Well, the fateful day came, the warrany passed, and I opened it up. Inside I discovered, much to my dismay, that not just one or two, but an entire 9 different screw holes were missing their screws. I only ever found 6 of them in the case. Some were for the heat sink. The heat sink was held on by only the gooey thermal gell and pressure from the back of the case. None of the screw holes for the heat sink were still fastened. No wonder I occasionally got shutdowns with "hot cpu" messages in the logs (I had thought it was because I might have been covering the vent with my leg when I had it on my lap).
Also, Xfree86 had started behaving badly (dying at random times) and I found out why when I opened the case - the ATI video card (which was also supposed to be protected by that unscrewed heat sink - it covered video card and CPU) had a few spots where the soldering had apparently melted and I could see brown burn marks near it.
So here I was stuck with a computer that was broke, a day out of warranty, because it hadn't been screwed together very well, and since it's a laptop, trying to go to a third-party for a replacement video card is totally impossible - they're all unique.
Sigh. They're software setup was good, but my experience with their physical durability was piss-poor - and that's an important factor for a laptop.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I don't know about you lot, but I can't really extend the "linux certified" qualification to the radeon series, on account of those bloody drivers..
I can't help feeling that nvidia would have been a better choice here, on account of ease of use (I know, I know, both ATi and Nvidia drivers are binary-only, but the nvidia one is so much more reliable, and the Ati driver's a bitch to get working)
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.
Am i the only one who looked at the beveled base, the color of the plastic, the three buttons in back with the mech grill...and thought..."Oh, it's a Sony VAIO"?
So...um...what's the point, when you can just go out and buy a Sony VAIO, probably for cheaper, since it's not being sold as a niche product? I'd also be amazed if whoever actually made that laptop gave Linux Certified a better price per unit than Sony...so they're making less of a margin than Sony or they've passed that price increase right along to you.
Please help metamoderate.
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!
I've been searching for a windows free laptop with an nvidia gfx card, but they seem to be a mythical beast indeed. I'm not willing to pay for a GPU that I don't get to fully utilize.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
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
until ATI pulls their heads out of their asses and make linux binary drivers on par with nvidia they will continue to suck.
A binary only driver will always suck. But actually I have a computer with a Radeon 7000 that Fedora Core could use "out of the box". Some of their Mobility ones OTOH are going to cause lots of trouble. In fact I get better performance with a celeron 568 MHz CPU and i810 than on a 2.2GHz P4 laptop with a Radeon Mobility chip.
What I want to know about this laptop is if it works with all open source software, if not their certification is bullshit.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?