On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 07:32:25PM +0200, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta wrote: > On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 06:54:17PM +0200, Roberto Sanchez wrote: > > Greetings list, > > > > I have been looking at purchasing a new computer for a few months now. > > I have gone back and forth between a desktop or notebook quite a bit, and > > I have finally decided that I want to get a notebook. Of course, the real > > challenge is finding an affordable one with Linux preinstalled. After > > this slashdot story about HP selling selling Linux laptops in Thailand > > http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/23/1857246&mode=thread&tid=106&tid=137&tid=185 > > came out, I called HP to find out when they would be offered in the US. > > Of course, they had no clue what I was talking about. > > > > The point of this whole diatribe is that I have decided that I will probably > > get the Lindows (yuck!) Mobile PC (available from idot.com). If I purchase > > it I will erase Lindows and install Debian Sid on it. I am asking here > > to see what everyone thinks of the price/value on this thing and overall > > impressions. I am not too concerned with hardware comaptibility since IIRC > > Lindows is based on Debian unstable. > > > > You can have a look at Slashdot's article when this notebook was > announced: > > http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/20/1633212&mode=nested&tid=137 > > Your questions will probably be answered there. > > For more of a bird's eye view of the processor, take a look at http://www.via.com.tw/en/Digital%20Library/pr_933c3.jsp for some information on the processor. I just have a few comments about the components though. At the surface it seems like a good price but I would go through each component, find resources for it on the web, locate the status of drivers, and see whether Lindows had to do anything "unusual" to get support for the device. By unusual, I mean a closed source binary driver which would only work for their product. I think the few major areas I would focus on are the sound, networking, and video display adaptor.
I would also call the distributor and ask some basic questions about the laptop itself. Can a person do repairs on it or add things like memory or disk drives? Some laptops are harder than others. My Dell Inspiron I4100 is actually easy to work on if one wants to replace hard disk or memory. Just to get a state of the affairs of the chipsets, perhaps a visit to viaarena or whatever their forums are called these days would help also. I have to admit to a bit of distrust of VIA overall for historic reasons around their issues with certain chipsets in the past. I still use VIA systems though to this day and I have one that I have carefully upgraded the bios on to mitigate any disk corruption issues. -- Michael Perry | Do or do not. There is no try. -Master Yoda [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.lnxpowered.org
