[ltp] Re: How do you like your W500 or W700?

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009, Bill Wohler wrote:
> Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org> writes:
> > Avoid nvidia at all cost.
> 
> ?

You are going to have a lead weight piece of crap in ~2 years, when they
drop support.  Which they will.  They have what, three or four *legacy*
video drivers already?  Each of them require updates every one or two kernel
releases to even compile, let alone keep working... this is NOT going to
scale forever.

I want my laptops to last for five years, so nVidia is out right away for
that "legacy driver" crap alone.  Even if I would replace them every year, I
still want to be free to use whatever kernel I want, and that ALSO kicks
nVidia out of the picture right away.

> I'm using radeon now, and the 3D graphics is definitely not
> accelerated. I've never been able to get fglrx working on my box.

If you have DRI properly set up, it will be.  My T43 running Debian Lenny,
with a ATI X300, *IS* accelerated.  I do not use fglrx, but rather the
free radeon drivers for X.org.

That said, fglrx also works (including for suspend/resume, with the
appropriate video quirks).  But I don't trust its stability.

> Can Linux take advantage of the "Intel Turbo Memory hard drive cache"
> or the "Smart Card Reader"?

Just the Smart Card Reader.  Forget about the Intel TMHDC, it is lead weight
and probably something really badly designed if Intel hasn't seen fit to
release information for a Linux driver to be written yet.

I can't say much about the rest.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh