On Friday 28 November 2003 10:32 pm, Fajar Priyanto wrote: > Dear all, > I want to buy a notebook, but I'm not really sure because it's quite > expensive. I thought of buying a Pentium 4 one. Could you pls give me > advice on: > 1. Regarding the price and technology, is it the right time to buy a > notebook? 2. What brand and series do you suggest that work best for Linux > installation? Many thanks, > Fajar. > You will get as many answers to this question as there are Linux users. Couple things to remember.
1) The Intel Centrino is nothing but a brand. A notebook must have a Pentium-M processor, a Intel 855 chipset and an Intel Wireless card. If it doesn't have one of them, it can't be called Centrino. 2) The Intel wireless card does not have native Linux driver. I works with something called the driverloader from Linuxant. This is a wrapper that allows you to use the XP driver in Linux. So if you want wireless with built-in WiFi, do some research here. 3) The Pentium-M at 1600MHz is a faster processor than the Pentium4-M at 2.4MHz because it does more work per clock cycle, similar in concept to an AMD AthlonXP 2400+ running at 2.0GHz will beat a P4-2.4. I have experimented with this myself and found that the Mandrake 9.2 kernel compiles on my laptop with a Pentium-M 1.6GHz in 230 seconds, while it takes 244 seconds on my desktop machie with an AthlonXP 2400+. 4) Most laptops come with winmodems. Make sure you buy one with one supported by the Linux kernel. 5) On the newest models, don't expect everything to work right out of the box. You will pretty much be able to get everything to work, but there will be some tweaking. For instance on my IBM T41, I had to compile a driver module for my modem and my Cisco wireless card, but everything works and works well. 6) ACPI doesn't always work well, so you may want to consider whether the machine still supports APM. In my opinion, the machines around $1,800-2,000 are in the sweetspot right now in terms of features, etc. -- /g
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