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."

Comments

But

[Anonymous Coward]

How fast does it compile Gentoo?

ACPI

[Mdalek]

...and when is ACPI going to be working in 2.6.x, so far the hibernate and suspend functions crash my laptop (toshiba satellite 18xx - even toshiba_acpi doesn't do much (fan status + brightness).

Re:ACPI

[Anonymous Coward]

Get used to it, ACPI will always be a world of shit for anything non-Microsoft. This was by design. ACPI is complex. Remember that somebody at Toshiba or whatever laptop manufacturer is actually qualifying their ACPI implementation with a Microsoft OS. It is the vendor's responsibility to ensure that the ACPI system works...with Windows XP. The fact that ACPI works as well as it does in Linux and *BSD is due to a large number of volunteers.

Your choices are either to: a) fix it yourself and submit patches b) wait til someone else fixes it c) punt and use Microsoft Windows XP. I know a lot of people in the community that choose option c and I am not one those that would fault them (or you) for it if a and b are not practical.
Complaining on slashdot is definitely not going to help you though.

In 2002 when I bought a Compaq it was pretty much assumed that you would have to hack AML. Things have improved much since then, and the 2.6.x power interfaces and implementations are vastly superior to anything previous. The core kernel support for power support is excellent (the part that is not ACPI specific). ACPI sucks ass as a complete design, although the linux kernel implementation is decent and contributors are working to get a bug for bug compatibility with AML written for Microsoft Operating Systems.

When I first got by IBM T40 a few months ago the thing would lock up on power down and sleep (ie, if you powered down the screen would blank but the thing was actually still running). This required some troubleshooting and some code changes in the relaxed AML interpreter, and now it works.

From a purely hardware standpoint

[pat_trick]

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!

No ACPI?

[jwr]

This is a joke, right? Linux-certified laptop, no ACPI support?

ACPI support is absolutely essential on a laptop.

nice review, a few flaws

[hdd]

"The laptop will automatically shut down if the battery goes below 10%, sometimes without a warning (which is actually a good thing, because users should never leave batteries drain below ~20%, as this damages all batteries in general)."

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.

What's the point of "desktop replacements"?

[evilviper]

The laptop is a desktop replacement

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?

compare to a Mac:

[Johnny Mnemonic]

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:

• 1.33 Ghz G4
• 14" display with 1024x768
• 512 RAM (upgrade)
• 60GB HD
• 802.11G installed
• DVD CD R/W
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 32MB of RAM.
• 6 hour battery life, but Apple lies so lets call it 4 hrs.
• Firewire, USB 2.0, 10/100 ethernet--both have these, though.
• With the RAM upgrade: $1,399.

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.

A little biased....

[todesengel]

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...

I had one of these - it breaks easy

[DunbarTheInept]

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.