[ltp] T61p with nVIDIA Quadro FX 570M / WUXGA on 15.4" ?

[Marius Gedminas]

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On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 11:03:19AM +0200, Bj=F8rn Ola Smievoll wrote:
> Had my T61p for about a week, and got OpenSUSE 10.3 Beta 3 up and running=
=20
> yesterday.  Have tried among others Ubuntu 7.04 and Fedora 7, but all=20
> distros have had (minor) bugs that makes installation hard (i.e. Fedora=
=20
> doesn't recognize the cd/dvd-drive after initial boot on from the cd).

I've had mine for a month now.  Installation (Ubuntu Gutsy Tribe 3
prerelease) was very painful then, but many of the bugs I've reported
(or found already reported) are already fixed.

I've switched SATA mode to Compatibility in the BIOS to get the CD to
work.  I haven't tried switching it back to AHCI to see if newer
kernel/disto config supports it.

> OpenSUSE 10.3, Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 will all be released in the near=
=20
> future (1 - 2 months) and it seems they will provide a trouble-free=20
> installation process when available in final versions.

That's very likely.

> An additional upside was that OpenSUSE instantly recognized and configure=
d=20
> the Intel wlan card.

Does it work with Network Manager?  It doesn't for me (Ubuntu Gutsy,
ipw3945).

I'm very disappointed with Intel's ipw3945 drivers:

  * closed-source binary daemon that just dies every now and then for no
    apparent reason (symptom: iwconfig says eth1: no wireless
    extensions; fix: sudo /sbin/ipw3945d-`uname -r`)

  * doesn't work with Network Manager (it sees networks and associates,
    but won't issue DHCP requests; this might be a bug in NM rather than
    the network driver)

  * doesn't understand that 'iwconfig eth1 essid any' means "use
    whichever AP is available" and I have to manually set the essid and
    only then do ifup eth1 --force to get wireless.

>> Any gotchas with the T61p with this card?
>> Also, is 1920x1200 WUXGA only readable by small animals on a 15.4"
>> screen or is it ok for humans too?  I'm very happy with 1400x1050 on
>> a 14.1" T40, as a comparison point.
>
> The fonts in OpenSUSE was a tad bit too large actually. It still uses Xor=
g=20
> 7.2, I belive 7.3 might handle this better (read something about it=20
> configuring according to actual screen DPI).

Xorg's been using the actual screen DPI for a very long time.  If you
took a ruler and measured the height of 10 point font, you ought to get
10/72 of an inch (3.5 mm in sane units), or slightly less, because those
10 points also include descenders and in any case, font size these days
is more of a rough indication rather than an accurate measurement of the
properties.

> Might just be a tweaking=20
> issue with the distro too.  Other than the font size I think things looke=
d=20
> clearer in X than in Vista.

You could launch gnome-font-properties and fiddle with the DPI setting
used for rendering fonts.  Some fonts are optimized for a specific DPI
(e.g. Microsoft's 96pt default) and do not look good at other
resolutions.

Marius Gedminas
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Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning -- Isaiah 5:11

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