[ltp] New ThinkPad

[Steven J. Owens]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 08:50:35AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> Paul Seelig wrote:
> >Writing only in general terms, far from giving specific recomendations:
> >
> >The problem with byuing any new machine is that one becomes the Linux
> >beta tester, if not even alpha tester, for the rather newish hardware.
> >If i'd be you, i'd rather check the maturity of the Linux support for
> >any possible machine via www.thinkwiki.org and decide where to spend the
> >money on the basis of the thus acquired knowledge.
> >
> >Due to these considerations i once decided to stick with the T61 (also
> >even T60) generation Thinkpads using Penryn CPU's, mostly relying on
> >Intel graphics due to the infamous nVIDIA bug. Depending on one's own
> >work requirements, this might already be enough oomph for the EURO.
> >
> >And if one doesn't mind the shift to 16:10 or even 16:9 display ratio,
> >even something like the T400/T500 or T410/T510 would already be a good
> >choice.
> >
> >If you absolutely need only the latest Thinkpad generation, it will be
> >hard to benefit from the already gained and documented experience of
> >already exisiting users.

     Amen.  I just bought a top of the line t520, and am now
replicating my previous experience with the then-bleeding-edge t43p.

     On the other hand, I'm _just now_ replacing my t43p, so I have a
tendency to hang onto these things for quite awhile :-).  Thus,
despite the frustrations - the t520 is still a bit undersupported: I
have to use hibernate instead of suspend; I'm not actually using the
nvidia support yet because I don't want to spend a few days fiddling
with drivers; sound seems kind of lackluster; we've seen numerous
reports of lockups here on the list - I figure that soon enough the
t520 will be into "well explored" territory and I'll get another
sevearl years of useful life out of it.

> As for 16:9 etc, my R31 is the last 4:3 device I own.  Everything
> else is wide screen.  Even my main computer monitor is 16:9 1080p
> and both my TVs are wide screen too.

     The 16:9 screen was pretty disappointing.  I found it a real
buzzkill at first, hadn't realized how much it was going to bug me.
If they'd just kept the screen height of the old size and added screen
width, I'd be a much, much happier camper.

     However, I did eventually get used to it.  Although I had some odd
problems with pixel width last night.  I used imagemagick to rotate a
roughly letter-box proportioned jpeg.  The new jpeg looks squashed to
me, but not to people elsenet looking at it, and linux reports the new
image as the same dimensions (576x432 vs 432x576).  My current
suspicion is that something is wonky with my pixel width, but I don't
have time to spend a few days fiddling with drivers.

-- 
Steven J. Owens
puff@darksleep.com / (412) 401-8060 cell 
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