Good stuff. http://www.workswithu.com/ also reviewed 2 linux systems recently, but from a common user perspective (no benchmarks and etc).
Phoronix: Retail PC Linux Testing & Benchmarking
It's approaching five years since Phoronix was conceived and in that time we have published 1,300 featured articles (many of them can be found here) and thousands of news postings that relate to using computer hardware -- both desktop and server related -- on Linux. A vast majority of these articles have been about computer components like motherboards, graphics cards, and processors, but very few have been about retail PCs that consumers can easily buy in stores or on the Internet...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjkzMQ
Good stuff. http://www.workswithu.com/ also reviewed 2 linux systems recently, but from a common user perspective (no benchmarks and etc).
Well, we have three Ubuntu Dells in my family, my sister has a Latitude with 8.10, my mom got the Inspiron 1525n with 8.04, and I got the Inspiron 1420n and am now dual booting 8.04.1 and 8.10..
What's odd is that Dell's Ubuntu page doesn't have either the 1420n or 1525n anymore.. They were the two best deals too.
Maybe I'll have to start some kind of Windows-refund business, where you pick the laptop from whatever company you want, sign this thing, then I order it and get the Windows license refunded and an Ubuntu install with all the essentials installed...
I could probably operate on the refunded Windows licenses alone.
End users shouldn't have their choice of hardware at all restricted by their choice of a Free operating system.
Last edited by ethana2; 12-15-2008 at 08:57 PM.
Please tll me you guys are going to do some System76's http://system76.com/ and other linux only companies.
I'd like to see some runs of their laptops at least.
Do they still sell those Linspire boxes?
How about something from Puget? http://www.pugetsystems.com/ Last I heard they would do an install of Ubuntu for you, albeit unsupported. Though they do build some nice high end boxes.
[EDIT] I just checked http://www.pugetsystems.com/alternate_os.php and it sems that they perfer Ubuntu but will also install Fedora 10 or Open SUSE 11 upon request, though the page does seem a bit dated as still not knowing that Creative has released drivers and whatnot.
Last edited by Duo Maxwell; 12-16-2008 at 01:41 AM.
I bought a Samsung NC10 on Friday. It has some issues with recent distributions. But nothing serious. Unfortunately Linux seems to consume more power than windows.
Some Fn key combinations don't emit a key released event. A patch, that fixes the issue is available[1].
With a patch[1] to hal-info the corresponding keycodes will assigned and the keys will work.
Using Fn + ESC will suspend/hibernate the netbook twice. Maybe that is due to gnome-power-manager seeing the ACPI event and the keycode. Will test later if disabling one of them helps.
Gnome-power-manager does not warn me about low battery status. But I think that got patched in Ubuntu.
WiFi worked out of the box with Fedora 10. Maybe blacklisting[3] ath_pci and ath_hal will work.
You could also try a more recent version of the ath5k driver following this guide[4]. It helped me getting a better signal. But the speed is still stuck at 12Mbits. Will test the madwifi driver later.Code:$ lsmod | egrep "cfg80211|mac80211|ath5k" ath5k 120332 0 mac80211 171824 1 ath5k cfg80211 34840 2 ath5k,mac80211
[1] http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12021
[2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/hal-info...dd45acf37c3561
[3] http://nc10linux.wordpress.com/2008/...reless-driver/
[4] http://nc10linux.wordpress.com/2008/...s-performance/
I'm also affected by this bug: "ath5k phy0: unable to reset hardware: -11" http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12080
And I'm not sure when and why this happens. It seems that suspending the machine can cause this.