On Jul 11, 2006, at 2:49 PM, Rick Funderburg wrote:
Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 [subtract $99]
128MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1300 HyperMemory™ [subtract $50]
256MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400 HyperMemory™ [Included in Price]
256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™Go 7300 TurboCache [add $30 or $1/month1]
Do any of these chips work better than the others with Linux? I
would like to have good 3d support, but it isn't as important as
having good suspend support. I would also like the chip to be
fairly cool when not flexing its 3d muscles.
Either of the ATIs are going to be a big pain, skip them. That
leaves you with two choices:
1) GMA950 - best open source support, slowest 3D performance (though
still acceptible for anything but the latest games or modeling
applications)
2) nVidia - best vendor driver support for Linux, but closed source
drivers. Best 3D performance.
It's your call. I don't think the 3D chipset heat is going to be an
issue for either when idle. I know some older Dells have suspend
issues with Linux, I don't know how much is based on the video
chipset and how much is just a cheesy ACPI implementation in the
hardware and/or Linux kernel.
FWIW, I would also be open to general laptop recommendations.
Requirements are high-res screen, less than $1100, wifi. Bluetooth
is a plus.
Apple MacBook. Seriously. Dual core processor, widescreen, durable,
Bluetooth, wireless, USB, firewire. You don't pay the Windows tax,
though if you wipe the provided OS and replace it with Linux I guess
you're paying a matching Apple tax. You can also opt to stick with
OS X, which is *nix (BSD) based, and allows you to run X11 and all
your favorite open source apps along with Mac apps. And you'll have
perfect suspend support.
Otherwise, Dells are fine and probably your best option in that price
range. Here's a decent review of your laptop's brother, the E1405:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/e1405.ars
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Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com
Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting
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