[ltp] Buying a T41p

[Rob Browning]

Cameron McCormack <cam-linux-thinkpad@aka.mcc.id.au> writes:

>   1. How would the 1.7GHz Pentium M compare to, say, my desktop 2.4 GHz
>      Pentium 4 machine?  At the moment I'm doing a lot of Java 2D
>      graphics development work, and I don't want it to be much slower
>      than my desktop.  I have read articles saying that the performance
>      of Centrino machines with a given processor speed are comparable to
>      P4s with a higher speed.  Is this correct?

I think other people pretty much covered this, but the P-M is a lot
more efficient than the P4 (per Hz).

FWIW, in the tests I've run, my t41p with a 7200rpm-drive beats a
XP2100 with a 10k raptor that I have here.

>   4. For those of you running Linux on this model Thinkpad, could you
>      give me a brief list of the things that don't work properly (if
>      any)?

Over even just the past couple of months things have improved
dramatically.  I run powernowd, the latest madwifi wireless, and
kernel 2.6.4.  Pretty much everything seems to work (both suspend to
RAM and suspend to disk, though I haven't re-checked suspend-to-ram
lately), and though I haven't had time to verify, it seemed like the
machine actually suspended to disk (ACPI) sucessfully yesterday, even
though the ath0 driver hadn't been removed.

X on the t41p is still a little tricky (with the FireGL chip).  I
think I posted earlier about this, but if you want to use xfree86,
you'll need a more recent release than many distributions have
packaged, and they may not package it anytime soon until/unless the
issues surrounding the recent license change are resolved.  I just
built a copy of CVS from a couple of months ago locally, and at long
as it keeps working, I'll probably just leave it alone until Debian
sorts things out.  Also note that with the current xfree86 support you
won't get accellerated 3d, but the 2d support is fine.

Oh, and at least when I bought it, IBM's "Express Saver" laptops were
much cheaper than building the same configuration yourself.

Hope this helps.
-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592  F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4