Toshiba laptop

[Ken Moffat]

Chong Yu Meng wrote:

> Hi Ken,
>
> I know I'm coming in late to the discussion. Hope you haven't bought
> the laptop yet. See below.
> Ken Moffat wrote:
>
>> Celeron M 1.4ghz
>>  
>>
> I'm running a Celeron 1.6GHz Thinkpad, and it is a little slow and
> runs hot. I had to bump up the RAM to 512MB to run FC4+XFCE4. KDE and
> Gnome were too heavy for it running 128MB RAM. It was much worse when
> running the 2.4 versions of the kernel, but with the 2.6.x versions,
> performance is ok.


I run 2.6 kernels, and use Libranet linux (debian offshoot) but don't
want a slow hot laptop.

What is the processor of choice in laptops?

>
>> Atheros 802.11b/g/wireless
>>  
>>
> This is the real problem. Putting aside all the GNU politics, I had a
> Atheros card that was just annoying. MadWIFI works with it, but
> everytime you upgrade your kernel you have to re-compile the drivers.
> If you are dependent on RPM packages and do "yum" or apt-get updates,
> you would want to re-compile the drivers. Why I say that is: I believe
> RPM packages of MadWIFI are provided by the DAG repository, but the
> updates lag behind the kernel updates, sometimes by hours, sometimes
> days, so you may be in situations where you have an updated kernel
> with suddenly no network access. If you're using yum to update your
> kernel, this can be really annoying.
>
> Also USD$500 is really too much to be paying for this old laptop.
> Regards,
> pascal chong
>
>
>

Very good advice. One thing; this isn't an old laptop, it is new, and I
have some store credit. I think I will pass on the basis of the MadWIFI
problems.

Thanks for all the advice. I'll look around for a  better laptop with
more linux friendly h/w.


-- 
ken