[Novalug] Laptops

Sean McGowan sean@mcgowanet.com
Sun May 13 18:39:38 EDT 2012


On 05/13/12 16:43, American Dave Kline wrote:
> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 04:29:57PM -0400, Dan Arico wrote:
>
>> I'm look for one with more screen real estate (17 inches would be nice)
>> that will work with a minimum of fiddling. I'm looking for new, not
>> used. Any suggestions?
> For Linux support, I would suggest Lenovo.  You've had a wireless issue
> in the past with Lenovo, but I can't recommend their hardware support
> more.  I've had two Lenovo laptops, a T500 and currently an x220.  Both
> ran Fedora and RHEL flawlessly.
>
> At home, I've got an Asus laptop which works fine with Linux with some
> tweaking.  IE, you have to tweak a couple of things because the pipe key
> gets confused as a ">" symbol.  Fixable, but annoying.  Also the audio
> codec is squirrely, meaning you'd have to Alsa config files to get
> things like headphone detection and the microphone working.
>
> I did have the video card die, and I was very impressed by Asus support.
> I didn't even pay shipping.  My next home machine, however, will be
> Lenovo due to Linux friendliness.
Interesting... I have the ASUS G72GX that I bought used from 
microcenter.  I bought it for the 17in screen, and at the time I was 
playing with OGRE, and needed something  that could handle it.  It is a 
nice machine, that worked completely out of the box for me.  No alsa 
tweaks, no keyboard tweaks.  If I didn't have to leave the back off to 
keep the GPU from overheating, it would be a great machine.  (although, 
I do not like thaat the vanity lighting does not shut off during 
hibernation... I have been meaning to look in to this.)

However, I too plan on purchasing a Lenovo next time.  The problems that 
I have had w/ the asus revolved around the ath9k drivers and nvidia 
drivers...  I have had to roll back the kernel for nvidia (w/ arch) and 
quit using fedora (15 and 16) because there was a month and a half (3.1 
and 3.2 kernels) where the ath9k driver would panic randomly.  Both of 
these events are well documented online, but nonetheless give me pause 
to invest in a mchine that depends on drivers that are not as well 
supported.

fwiw, I have also had great success with older Toshiba Satellite a105 
(but not 17in screens).  like the lenovo, they us intel graphics and 
intel wireless.




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