[ltp] What to take care of when buying a Lenovo?

[Richard Neill]

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

> Speaking as one of the people who look at ThinkPads *very* closely from a
> kernel point of view:
> 
> 1. Prefer ATI over nVidia on the GPU, at least for the next three years.
>    We should press nVidia to release docs, like ATI is now doing.
> 

Out of curiosity, is that true *now*, or just in the future? From an
ordinary user's perspective, I've found that nVidia's binary drivers do
at least work properly, whereas the ATI flgrx ones tend to crash.

Also, if you run an ATI card with the vesa driver, do you get the
power-saving?

My T60p has an ATI card in it, and is somewhat less than stable with
fglrx. With the vesa driver, it's pretty solid. Obviously for 3d stuff,
it's really bad (so much for xscreensaver!), but for 2D, the CPU is
sufficiently fast that I don't really notice. That said, the vesa driver
has absolutely no acceleration, not even for copyrect, which means that
scrolling a page requires 100 re-draws, rather than 100 line-draws +
vertical shifts. That pushes the CPU to 100%, and I can detect a slight
sluggishness.

Richard