Tue 2 Aug 2005
In my quest to find laptop utopia – I need a new portable workhorse – I am wrenching in agony at the lack of decent Linux hardware. Some come close but fail in one or two areas. My specs:
- Around or under $1200
- Athon 64 or Turon 64 CPU – I want a 64 bit machine to test my 64 bit packages on – must compile fast but battery life is not all that important (though it would be nice to have power and battery savings)
- 1 gig of memory with expandability for the future
- A decent graphics chipset that can do decent 3d – must work well enough with open source drivers to handle when composite becomes a standard on the Linux desktop (or at least have people working on it)
- 15″ widescreen LCD that shows crisp text – this is going to become my main development machine
- An integrated wireless card that works (Atheros is good)
So of that I have found notebooks in my price range. The biggest problems are the wireless cards and graphics. Most I have seen with the specs I want have Broadcom chips. I’m going to be running Rawhide on this puppy and don’t want to be compiling ndiswrapper or what have you every time the kernel updates. Same with the graphics chipset. Most have ATI of which a fair number have a chipset which only works well with the proprietary drivers.
The wireless isn’t such a big deal since I could just buy a cheap card but why should I have to? I want it built in and just working. In the end I might just have to go with ditching the 64 bit chip. That widens my range of graphics card/wireless combos to choose from but it means I have to rely on lab equipment to test and fix problems that crop up on 64bit machines. I already have a dual processor Xeon on my desk so having more diverse hardware allows me to test more thoroughly.
*sigh* Life as in politics is often a series of compromises.
UPDATE: I have been informed that the Atheros “Open Source” drivers require a binary blob – not cool calling the Open Source. Looks like I am looking at the Intel chips which do require a binary blob but it is not tied to the module which ships with Fedora.
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August 2nd, 2005 at 12:42 pm
The reverse-engineered r300 ATI driver should be in the Xorg 6.9/7.0 release, and it works with pretty much anything except PCIE cards so far. It doesn’t perform quite as well as the binary one, but I can play pretty much anything but the very newest games (ut2k4, doom3) at a playable framerate.
August 2nd, 2005 at 1:21 pm
Don’t have your heart set so much on Atherod for the wifi – the intel ipw2200 driver is excellent, and the cards are very common now…
August 2nd, 2005 at 1:26 pm
why are you so worked up over OSS drivers for video, but not wireless (i.e. atheros)
August 2nd, 2005 at 3:29 pm
I have a Gateway 7422GX. Its kindof a beast sizewize, but came standard w/1gig, an 80gig harddrive, amd64 3400, and the broadcom 801g chipset, ati rv350 chipset w/ 128meg, a samsung 15″ widescreen, etc. I currently have rhel 3.0, FC4, suse 9.3pro, and xp home on it. I understand your issues w/ ndiswrapper, but its really been a non-issue for me. This isn’t my dev machine, and mainly for wandering around the house, and building/testing for alt platforms. The ati is a slight pain, but it also is tolerable. and the price was in your range as well…
all in all, i’d give the beast a thumbs up for linux work…
August 2nd, 2005 at 6:12 pm
The Intel 2915abg works great with the ipw2200. OK, so it requires binary firmware. I am sure you have other hardware with binary firmware, albeit possibly not being loaded by the driver.
August 2nd, 2005 at 7:11 pm
The reason given in Madwifi for the blob for the Atheros driver is that the FCC requieres that software controlled radios do not allow users to specify frequencies and channels outside of the allowed range. He says it thus makes it hard to publish open source wifi drivers.
I’m just happy I can get all my hardware to work with Linux. Mindows users don’t get source for their drivers and we are a minority market. I’m just happy if a company (nvidia) releases drivers for linux. I don’t see how we can honestly expect companies to give us special treatment being a minority. It’ll just drive them away. Like I said, I’m just happy I can get all my hardware to work
August 3rd, 2005 at 1:40 am
Check out the ‘pure’ Sonoma style Centrino laptops.
I know it’s not AMD64 or even Em64t (do you realy need over 4gigs of ram on this laptop?), but it’s almost fully supported by OSS drivers.
the standard intel video card GMA 900 (provides ATI 9200-9600 level performance) is supported by DRI thanks to Intel releasing specs. By the next release of x.org it should be fully supported. Linux 2.6.12 included DRM support, also.
Those are a hella (remember the cartman) better then the laughable ‘exteme blaster’ intel stuff. Probably revamped due to the up coming OS X/Vista releases. They are much better technically compatability-wise, and offer obvious performance improvements.
The wifi is supported by Intels stuff and is Free except for the firmware.
Just beware of OEM’s sticking in Broadcom and Conextent (or Texas instruments) wifi in place of the Intel stuff. You want to avoid those bastards like the plague. Nobody sane likes NDISwrapper.
ACPI support should be there, if not now, then it will be… They are well designed in that respect. Just make sure that everything is intel. ACPI freaking ROCKS. seriously.
CPU scaling keeps everything cool and makes your battery last for a long time. Suspend-to-RAM is something I find VERY helpfull for my ibook (running Debian). I can pack my notebook away for a entire week and then have it on and have a fully usable desktop in under 4 seconds. (including openning up my bag)
If you want to avoid Intel (which is understandable) and go with a AMD64 unit and need a good wifi setup check out Ralink-based cards.
They have released GPL drivers for their rt2400 (802.11b) rt2500 (802.11g) and usb series stuff and also enjoy OpenBSD support due to releasing documentation.
There is a undergoing project to unify the drivers to hopefully get it included into the kernel proper. This is called rt2×00 project and deserves much more attention then it gets. They also support and do bugfixes for it. No need to deal with firmware either (bonus!)
So that’s a company that released GPL drivers and kept the FCC-happy by actually embedding the restrictions into the hardware firmware.
A list of devices are aviable here:
http://ralink.rapla.net/
and they are inexpensive, too. I just ordered a ASUS USB rt2500 unit from newegg for like 36 bucks and (I think) a PCI card (with remote antenna) for $20. A PCMCIA or MiniPCI card should be just as cheap.. and they are suppose to be very good performers,too.
Just beware.. many big companies whitelist hardware that is usable in their MiniPCI slots to work with cards only aviable installed from said companies.
Also another alternative is the ibook. I bought mine because it was a great deal for the time, although now it’s been eclisped by Intel setup in my opinion. (being small, moble, and long-lasting battery was the primary concernes for me). the only thing taht sucks with it is the wireless support. It uses a very propriatory broadcom unit with propriatory minipci slot and there is no chance of getting it working with PPC Debian.
That’s why I bought the usb asus/ralink unit. There is suppose to be end-ness issues with it, unfortunately, but those will be resolved by the rt2×00 stuff I am told.
For me mobility (size + battery life) is the key, not CPU speed. Fast compile times are acheived with my ghz-a-plenty desktop/file server and distcc…
August 3rd, 2005 at 1:45 am
oh, and one more thing.
When buying wifi cards be aware that many manufacturers will use completely different chipsets in same-named products. I tried to buy a Atheros unit and ended up with a hatefull texas instrument unit instead.. they had the same name exept one was “* v2″ and the other was “* v1″.
The screwed up part was that the box was _identical_ for both cards. Same name, same graphics, same lettering, same color. No mention of versions _anywere_ on the box.
Not until I plugged it in and struggled with the drivers for a hour and did a lspci did I find out I did not get the card I wanted.
Took it back for a full refund.
August 3rd, 2005 at 4:09 am
Have you thought of an Acer laptop? They get decent reviews over here in the UK, take for example the following model:
http://www.acernotebooks.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_1524WLMi_LX.A4105.091/version.asp
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
512MB RAM (upgradeable to 2Gb)
60GB
15.4 inch Widescreen TFT display (WXGA (1280 x 800))
nVidia GeForce FX Go5700
64MB
Dual DVD
Built in Wireless LAN 802.11g 54Mbps
3.60Kg Weight
August 3rd, 2005 at 8:23 am
You can blame the US FCC for the binary blob – it’s because of FCC certification that the binary blob is generated as it’s that blob which is certified, and that only… If it’s recompiled, needs re-certification…
A fully open source driver isn’t strictly legal under this rule… (inside the US that is)
August 3rd, 2005 at 5:29 pm
John, if you’re going to buy one locally, wait until next weekend, when you won’t have to pay sales tax.
August 4th, 2005 at 6:00 am
In this case, Fedora is to blame cause is a bit restrictive IMHO. FreeBSD ships with atheros. And, as we already know, it’s an open source OS. Just load if_ath, configure it and voila! you can even warwalk using the build-in wicontrol.