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Linux Laptop from R Cubed Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the more-the-merrier dept.

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.'"

11 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Dell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Dell must be quaking in its boots. And Apple... well let's just say Mr. Jobs should get acquainted with his local welfare office.

  2. A bit expensive for a Linux laptop? by gasmonso · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not trolling here, but the price does seem high... almost as if the MS tax in in there somewhere. Is there such thing as a Linux tax? Consider the Dell XPS M1210 for $1200.

    http://religiousfreaks.com/
    1. Re:A bit expensive for a Linux laptop? by also-rr · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well this one is 66% of the weight of the Dell (a big deal for me since I travel a lot - in fact being sub 3lb it's amazingly light), by the time I picked out similar specs for both the Dell and the R Cubed the comparison was around $1700 (Dell) vs $2000.

      $300 is easily paid for with the weight reduction and having every bug already worked out so I don't need to spend any time setting it up to run under Linux, in my opinion, but it depends how much you value your time I suppose.

      Anyway it's interesting enough that I'm seriously considering getting one as my next laptop instead of a MacBook Pro as I'm not sure I can face messing around like this to get wireless working again when I could have it all functioning out of the box.

      --
      Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
    2. Re:A bit expensive for a Linux laptop? by spuzzzzzzz · · Score: 3, Informative
      Although if the XP model doesn't cost any more there is also be a MS premium built in, which would be a shame
      On this page, you can see that adding Windows XP to a laptop costs $105.
      --

      Don't you hate meta-sigs?
  3. And why would I want to pay the premium by namityadav · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why don't the no-name revolutionary linux laptop makers understand that unless they sell their laptop for lesser than a similarly spec'd Dell Inspiron, people are going to buy the Inspiron and install Ubuntu instead.

    Yes, I know it's easier to have a pre-setup laptop and not have to worry about searching for ndiswrapper etc for wireless, but the community that the linux laptop makers are targetting actually loves such challenges.

    Okay, now I'll get back to trying to figure out how the heck this BCM4318 is going to work :-(

  4. Forget the software by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. So what? by fm6 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:So what? by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  6. Hot Item? by thunderpaws · · Score: 4, Funny

    Will it explode as well as a Dell?

  7. Re:Stripped down... it's a terrible laptop. by r_cerq · · Score: 3, Informative

    First, the graphics card isn't ATI or NVidia. It's Intel. That means no native OpenGL support
    Bzzt, wrong! Intel cards do support OpenGL, just not spectacularly. Here I am running XGL on one to prove it...

  8. Re:Stripped down... it's a terrible laptop. by massysett · · Score: 3, Interesting

    All these arguments show why it's not a good laptop for you, but that doesn't make it a "terrible laptop." First, you're wrong about the lack of OpenGL support. Intel chips do support OpenGL, and what's more, they do it with fully open-source kernel drivers. Compare that to nVidia or ATI chips which require proprietary kernel modules to get the same support.

    Second, the graphics memory is shared, but so what? That does matter if you're playing heavy duty games, but if your laptop use consists mainly of Web browsing, email, and Vim usage (as is true for my usage) then it doesn't matter if your memory is shared. If that's a real concern, throw an extra 512MB of RAM in there, which is still cheaper than going for a dedicated GPU.

    Third, yes, the screen is only 1024x768, but that also means it's small. The laptop is light and fits easily in my bag. Compare that to 1400x1050, which means widescreen and it means having a bigger panel. It's fine if you want that, but to some people portability is more important than screen real estate.

    Fourth, happiness might be doubling up on 9-cell batteries, but to me, happiness is not having to carry two batteries. Weight, weight, weight.

    In short, the laptop is made for someone with basic computing needs who values portability over power. It's not a gamers' notebook. That doesn't make it a "terrible" notebook, it just makes it a notebook not suited to everyone's needs. The same is true of one of those XPS monsters with a huge screen, high resolution, and dedicated GPU: it's a hulking machine that weighs several pounds more. That doesn't make it a "terrible" notebook, even if it does make it a notebook that I wouldn't buy.

    --
    Penny - plain text accounting