[ltp] which inexpensive thinkpad for ubuntu and a lot of compiling?

[Richard Neill]

michael@michaelshiloh.com wrote:

> Ah, the never-ending question: What is the right computer for me?

> So my priorities are:
> 
>     1. Price
>     2. Easy install of Standard Ubuntu (not Xubuntu or anything reduced)
>     3. Whatever can be done to improve compile time, without big price 
> increase
>     4. SVGA out to video projector for making presentations
>     5. 802.11
> 

Buy an R60e or similar. I paid £550 for one of these 9 months back, and 
I use it for real-time DV video compression/streaming. The Core-Duos are 
very good. Then, max it out on RAM (prob cheaper to buy from crucial.com 
than from IBM direct). Also make sure you get a big enough HDD for 
everything. (If you decide not to erase XP, you'll need about 8GB for it 
- yes, it really is that bloated these days).

Lastly, remember that a core-duo is a 2-cpu machine, so experiment with 
the number of threads running in gcc. [Some core-duos are essentially 
64-bit, but that's another story, and I don't have the details]

HTH,

Richard


P.S. If you are really focussed on price/performance, consider using 
sshfs  (or fish://) to mount a remote directory locally, and do the 
actual compiling on another machine.

P.P.S. If you buy a machine with an ATI card, you will wish you hadn't. 
My T60p is using the VESA driver for stability. AIGLX etc isn't 
particularly useful, but it *is* quite fun, and the Intel cards are 
best. Likewise, if you get the options, take the highest possible 
resolution for the screen.

P.P.P.S. With the exception of (some) wifi cards and (sometimes) 
suspend-to-ram, practically all thinkpads are now perfect with Ubuntu. 
You'll find the install is extremely easy. See also "prevu" for 
generating your own backports - v. neat!