Comments on: I call lolerskates

By: blizzard

blizzard — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:35:58 +0000

It’s just a mini. And I think the baseline number is too low – should be more like 25 watts to run a mini.

By: Casey

Casey — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:39:18 +0000

Chris, that’s an impressively low power consumption; is that your day-to-day rig? When you engage your armada of hand held devices what’s the total?

By: Basil Mohamed Gohar

Basil Mohamed Gohar — Sat, 24 May 2008 21:54:32 +0000

I think it is hard to avoid a bit of lag on the support side as long as hardware vendors stay hostile or ambivalent towards free software developers. I have an older Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop and nearly everything, from the sound card through to the Firewire port, are supported very well (at least under Fedora).

On a new laptop, I don’t know what to expect, though, because the hackers are just in a bind trying to poke the hardware to figure out what it does, rather than working with the vendors, who offer few or no channels of cooperation.

By: Andres Salomon

Andres Salomon — Sat, 24 May 2008 04:23:32 +0000

Linux support for my x40 is pretty great.. Unfortunately, it’s quite old (I’m on my 2nd battery, my 4th or 5th power cable, and I have huge cracks all over the display). I’m dreading having to find a new laptop that fits my criteria..

By: blizzard

blizzard — Sat, 24 May 2008 01:50:01 +0000

So I understand that it’s not the most awesome hardware in the world. It’s _mostly_ Intel top to bottom except for that Atheros chipset and whatever Apple did to the ACPI tables. Except that I still haven’t seen hardware that does work top to bottom.

In theory there’s the Dell XPS laptops that work. But I keep hearing that there’s still stuff that doesn’t work there (like sound.) Stephen O’Grady tried to run Linux on his X300 and had constant sound problems with it – recompiling drivers and whatnot.

So this still feels like blaming the victim and/or debugging the blame instead of the problem. (Not entirely, but still.) When are we going to have fully supported hardware that I _know_ will work? Last time I had working software + hardware together was the X31 with FC5 on it. It’s all been downhill since then.

By: Mr Jones

Mr Jones — Sat, 24 May 2008 00:49:43 +0000

The Linux hackers would have reverse engineered your proprietary Apple hardware, but there was an intimidating looking EULA forbidding it…

By: Jordan Crouse

Jordan Crouse — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:36:57 +0000

Richard is right; when the hardware is that closed, the open source folks are inevitably going to miss that sekret bit to turn off a bus or device. Next time buy from somebody more committed to teaching people how to actually use their hardware (insert shameless plug for the _other_ x86 vendor).

By: Shawn Wilsher

Shawn Wilsher — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:10:02 +0000

Some of the comments on that post you linked to make me sad :(

By: Jeff Walden

Jeff Walden — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:29:56 +0000

Haha, nice snark at the end there. :-)

By: blizzard

blizzard — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:09:53 +0000

Thanks, I fixed the name. I always get shit like that wrong. :)