Linux Laptop from R Cubed Reviewed

An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge (Also owned by VA) has a short writeup on R Cubed's latest laptop, the LS1250-L Linux laptop. From the article: 'My test machine came with Fedora Core 5, the GNOME desktop, OpenOffice.org 2.0, the Firefox browser, and Evolution mail client. The lineup also includes the normal assortment of multimedia players, administration tools, and games. If you prefer, you can choose SUSE 10.1, various flavors of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and even Microsoft Windows XP.'"

Comments

Most linux users get no OS...

[aersixb9]

Wouldn't most people with the technical ability to use/maintain a linux laptop just save a bit of money and get a laptop (probably a 'barebones' laptop) with no OS on it? Especially when you consider how custom linux is, and how advanced most linux users are...I wouldn't want someone else to install linux for me, although I actually am a Windows user...

Forget the software

[timeOday]

The tagline is all about the software that comes preinstalled. But really, living with Linux on a laptop is all about hardware support. Can it suspend to RAM or disk - even if 3d acceleration is enabled and I forget to remove my PCMCIA devices first? Can I dock and undock with a docking station - each time switching over to my high-res external desktop display - without rebooting? Does the WiFi work - including support for all the weird security and authorization mechanisms? These are the important questions a linux laptop buyer should ask.

So what?

[fm6]

The battery life seemed pretty normal, with a full charge running about 2 to 2.5 hours.

What's the point of creating yet another laptop with an overpowered CPU and no battery life? It would make more sense to use a less powerful CPU that doesn't suck up power. Especially when the system is designed to run Gnome on Linux — that's a configuration that would run happily on a system with 1/3 the hz.

Linux people have to stop producing technology whose only advantage over standard Wintel platforms is that there's no OS tithe to Redmond. Go with the Penguin's strengths: less resource hungry, so you can produce cheaper systems that use less power; open source, so you can fix all the usability bugs that Microsoft (and, alas, most Linux app designers) can't seem to deal with.

Re:So what?

[Bing Tsher E]

My first hand experience, running OpenOffice on Linux and Office 2000 on Windows 98 on the same older Pentium I laptop, is that it's nearly impossible to run 'productivity' apps on a 'popular' desktop like Gnome on said hardware. Office 2000 was no racehorse, either, but it at least was usable.

No, it is a misnomer to claim that modern Linux-based OSes are less resource hungry than Redmond bloatware. The modern 'Linuxes' may have caught up to Win98 in terms of usability, but they're resource pigs.

My tactic is to instead run a 'classic' X environment. In my case, I run FVWM2 but have also run the Window Manager (mwm) in OpenMotif (it's pretty nice, actually) on my systems.

Object-Oriented-C++/BlahBlah 'modern' environments like Gnome and KDE don't cut it, frankly.

Re:pre-loaded linux surprisingly absent

[namityadav]

why should i pay HP/Compaq for preloading my laptop with linux when i can just throw in suse 10.1 and everything but the broadcom wireless card works?
Two reasons:
1. So that you don't pay HP to preload Windows (Assuming HP won't sell you an OS less laptop because that may add a new cycle in their QA process)
2. Because then HP will ensure that our wireless cards, suspend, media buttons etc work everytime.

Some discrepancy. . .

[LunarCrisis]

Something's not right. From the review:

By itself the 11x9x1.5-inch LS1250-L weighs in at a svelte 3.62lbs.

And later. . .

The battery life seemed pretty normal, with a full charge running about 2 to 2.5 hours.

Umm excuse me? One look at the companies product page yields:

# Up to 7.9 hours battery life (72WHr. Battery Pack)
(. . .)
# Less than 3 lbs (with 24WHr. battery pack)

I can only draw one conclusion: the reviewer must be lying! After all, who can you trust to know a laptop better than the company itself?