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Intel Sonoma UK Launch Party
Benny writes "Intel held it's UK Sonoma lauch party last night and TrustedReviews have some pictures up of the machines on display including new models from HP, Dell, Samsung, Sony and Asus to mention a few."
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Is this just like the computer industry's equivalent to the auto industry's international car shows? Because this doesn't seem all that much like news to me, just a bunch of random laptops. Still pictures really don't show off processor capability, so what's the point? And couldn't they have wiped the fingerprints off of the screens of the ones at the bottom of page 2? Maybe it's just because I live in SEC country, but I first read it as Intel having a University of Kentucky Sonoma launch party, which made absolutely no sense.
Just another Mac zealot yacking about his "superior choice" with nothing to back it at all.
I'd prefer bulky and capable of running most apps (see: games) over metrosexually slick any day. However, for much less than the cost of a powerbook, I could still pick up a slick and functional AMD64 laptop from such vendors as ibuypower.com, and have the best of all worlds (form, function, and cash to spare).
if "most apps" to you means "games", then I can safely conclude you are 12 and could afford none of the above anyway.
You obviously know nothing about the laptop market. There's many different kinds of laptop categories, ranging from ultraportables to desktop replacements. There is no "standard" size as laptops are concerned. It all depends on your needs.
This is amazing. All these are products of different companies, bigger and smaller, from different countries and yet none of them really stands out from the crowd. Doesn't HP or Acer or anything have a design department? Or maybe it's a mindset of these companies that doesn't value the aesthetic perception?
Scroll wheels are built into the touchpad. When you hold the right-hand side of the touchpad, you are basically clicking the universal scroll. Move your finger up, it scrolls up, move it down, it scrolls down. Basic feature in Windows, and I presume Apples.
Not so much in Linux, unfortunately.
The Intel 915 should be a pretty nice Linux chipset.
.asoundrc or /etc/asound.conf configuration with the Dmix plugin to enable software mixing of multiple sound inputs.
Intel (and Via) is actually ver nice to Linux developers when compared to other companies such as Nvidia or ATI.
Both Intel and Via supply data and help out at least nominally with creating free software drivers for their hardware.
With the 915 they supplied documentation to the DRI 3d drivers guys well in advance to the chipsets release. It should be quite nice by now.
With the sound you probably will be able to run it with Alsa, too. Although its likely, like all other cheaper onboard sound cards, that it doesn't support hardware mixing and you'd have to setup a
The questionable bit is the wifi and the ACPI support.
Intel supported free software developement for it's Wifi cards (with seperate closed source firmware files, I am guessing) for the centrino design, so unless they have created something completely new for this generation (which I doubt) it should be working fine by the time we get a chance to buy these things.
If they released specs to DRI for 3d acceleration, I am guessing they did the same thing for the ACPI support for the ACPI Linux guys. This chipset is a extension of the old so that I'd bet for the immediate future you may have to patch a kernel to get full support, but it shouldn't be more then a couple months to get support for it into the mainstreme kernel.
Everything else Linux should support without problems.
Looking forward to the 915 + pentium-m's with onboard video in the desktop arena. Should make great little Linux workstations, small form factor servers (SOHO style stuff), and desktops.
Like everything I wouldn't want to be trying to deploy these over a hundred machines using Linux right off the bat, but after a few months and some personal use of them, I'd be happy to.