[wplug] Linux laptops

[Bryan J Smith]

First off, for info:
http://www.linuxlaptops.org

Secondly, as you experienced, there are a number of "barebone" notebook kits/vendors now.
For the AMD Turion products, these are often based on the nVidia C51/61 series.

The nForce** 4/4x0/5x0/6x0 series of peripheral logic in the MCP (Media Communication Processor) has been considered the "most Linux compatible" chipset for years now.
nVidia puts a lot of developers on the kernel and its GPL drivers**, and they keep the ATA and other logic fairly static, unlike Intel ICH (I/O Controller Hub) and ViA southbridges.
That means a lot of legacy kernels still work with the newer MCPs out-of-the-box, and the only time I've seen issues, they are PCI ID related
(especially for newer MAC+PHY combinations, which plagues many other, newer chipset combinations as well).

**NOTE: Do not confuse the nForce chipset logic with the GeForce GPU logic (of which nVidia has not released the source code for since the XFree86 3.3 days and they got letters from lawyers at Intel, Microsoft, SGI and others, long, long IP story).
Also note that you do not need to (and should not) load the nForce Linux driver set - that's only for old 2.4 kernels (nvnet when the kernel lacks the newer forcedeth driver, and nvsound when the kernel lacks ALSA).

As far as notebook video, that's always a serious PITA. No vendor, not even Intel, is good about supporting various output (like external video) scan range and other options with the standard MIT XFree86/Xorg drivers.
Now there are some unofficial Intel utilities/hacks, and Intel has saught to improve many third party boards/reference designs in notebooks to work with the MIT drivers better
(and it's far better for the 900 series than the 800 series), although a lot of it boils down to NDAs and stuff Intel won't put in the MIT driver (and none in the Linux kernel) that it does in the NT GDI and kernel drivers.

ATI has recently gotten much better in its MIT radeon driver support for the Xpress integrated video, and their proprietary fglrx is getting better.
But, as always, nVidia's proprietary, unified codebase is now 8 years mature and handles all those notebook nuainces, especially since they make the most popular C51/61 GPU chipset with the GeForce 6100/7100 series and can control it better.
Until various companies open up their IP on various routines - most notably Intel (for its DiME hack using software to do I/O MMU since its processors do not), ATI and nVidia's kernel modules will remain a proprietary and added load (while Intel's lack of the same feature results is piss-poor performance on Linux compared to Windows).

Now with all that said, I buy HP Pavilion series notebooks with nVidia C51/61 chipsets.
The outstanding "out-of-the-box" nForce support is unbeatable, even on the latest models, including suspend/hibernate, and even the very 1st generation HP Pavilion dv9000z series was fullu supported (I know, I have one and it's my main desktop).
That leaves only thr GPU aspect which, again, is the mindfield of GPL kernel driver with MIT X11 driver having many support issues or IP ladened vendor proprietary drivers that both implement the required kernel software I/O MMU for Intel-controlled PCIe (like AGP before it - a major reason why AMD bought ATI, to create a native HTX GPU that supports it's hardware I/O MMU and get rid of the need for a kernel software hack) and notebook-centric feature support.
Being that I've been running 3D on Linux for 10 years for professional reasons, I've long adopted nVidia (using 3rd party drivers before nVidia's initial open source attempt, and resulting closed source releases), I just do the latter.
After all, the OpenGL API is open (including an architectural review board, ARB, for vendor added API disclosure, inclusion and standardization), so the whole "proprietary" argument becomes code-only, as it does at least offer an open standard API (I.e., apps are written to an open standard).

With that said, I upgraded the GPU of my dv9000z to a GeForce Go (G72) 7600 for 10x the performance of the GeForce Go 6100 (NV44).
You have this option on HP Pavilions of 15" and all 17" (including Intel chipsets/processors), although the 6100 will still smack any Intel 900 series silly in both performance and features, let alone under Linux.
Of course, if you stick with the MIT X11 drivers, there is no 3D for nVidia (the open source project that is trying to emulate the software I/O MMU in the kernel plus the required X11 user-space features isn't usable for much beyond early GeForce GPUs, which the code is based on from nVidia's initial XFree86 3.3 code release before closure), and the Intel 900 series does at least offer a partial OpenGL 1.x implementation that is good enough for base AIGLX support
If you want to go that route, I would still recommend HP's Pavilion series with Intel Core/Centrino Duo.

HP is a closet supporter of desktop/portable Linux out of customer focus because they sell a lot of workstations/notebooks to a lot of EDA (e.g., semiconductor) and CAM (e.g., aerospace) customers.
I know, it was my career in Linux from 1997-2001 when the whole EDA (namely semiconductor) and CAM (namely aerospace) worlds went to Linux/GL from UNIX/GL, instead of porting to Windows/DX, largely because of initatives by nVidia and SGI.
Especially after the Intel-Dell-Microsoft fiasco of 2000 after the EDA community wanted 100,000 Linux desktops/year of the $5,000+ configuration, only to see Microsoft stall Dell QA from certifying them (long, poltical story).
It was after that which made HP the defacto-standard tier-1 PC OEM for the EDA/CAM world (again, long story).

Hence why I only trust HP to maintain the best Linux compatibility on the newest notebook models.
Other vendors are often fine, as long as you go more "trailing edge."
E.g., I just bought a Toshiba U205 series for my wife, which uses an older i945G chipset with ICH7 and older CardBus (not ExpressCard), etc... That is clearly a 2 year old Intel reference design.
Even though it came with Vista, it was designed for XP and I loaded both XP and Fedora 7 without issues (and earlier Fedora releases would have worked as well).

I can give you more info when I'm not on my Blackberry, as well as if and when you have follow-up questions.
Sorry for the babble - there's a crapload I could explain on this matter - including why IBM/Levono portables absolutely suck for Linux, and always have (including IBM "giving up" on Linux portables in 2002, known, buggy BIOS and hardware, etc...).

--  
Bryan J Smith - mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  
http://thebs413.blogspot.com  
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile  
    

-----Original Message-----
From: "chandan datta" <chandan.edge at gmail.com>

Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2007 02:26:02 
To:wplug at wplug.org
Subject: [wplug] Linux laptops


Hi Linus users,
I'm a visiting summer scholar at CMU from New Delhi.I wanted to get myself a new Linux laptop (without MS Vista pre-loaded).I visited the CMU Computer store ,but all of them have Vista.Where can I check up a good collection of Linux pre-loaded laptops ? 
I don't want a very high end system-a decent config -WIFI, 128/256 MB NVIDIA GPU,1 GB RAM,DVD reader will do(I'm looking for something under 1000$).Back at New Delhi I brought one Acer 4100 series with pretty decent config and Linpus linux loaded(it was easy to find). 

Help me guys !!!

-- 
Regards,
Chandan. _______________________________________________
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