I'm in South Africa and we get almost no laptops here preloaded with Linux.
All of them are preloaded with Windows XP Home/Pro. And it's not an optional
item either. When you ask them to remove the Windows because you don't want
it, you pay more. From what I could see locally, only IBM sells laptops with
Linux preloaded. Some laptops bought locally don't even work when you don't
have the Windows on it shipped by the manufacturer. If they ship XP Home
with it you can't load XP Pro or 2000 or 98 it just doesn’t work.
I asked one of the local manufacturers (Yes we build laptops in South Africa
which are exported to the rest of the world) they said that they are
subsidized by MS for every laptop they sell with Windows on it. Basically
they don't get paid to put Linux on the laptop...
Whether this is true or not I don't know but it makes sense if you think
that one company wanted to charge me about $100 more to give me a laptop
without Windows. (Windows XP Pro OEM costs about $100 in South Africa).
So what did I do? Bought a laptop which I knew supports Linux for about
$2200 (Centrino 1.7, 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD, WiFi) which came with Windows,
removed Windows and installed SuSE 9.3.
Albert
-----Original Message-----
From: Maura Edelweiss Monville [mailto:memonvil@artsci.wustl.edu]
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2005 04:52
To: Colin Carter
Cc: suse-linux-e@suse.com
Subject: Re: [SLE] SuSE on XTREME notebooks
Thank you for sharting your experience .
My problem is that I need to buy a very good laptop whose performances
are comparable to a desktop.
I spend by far too many hours working with my currently old desktop and
my poor eyes have started to give out.
Ideally I should get a laptop for using when I travel to conferences,
interviews, etc. and a desktop to work with at home.
In practise I cannot affor both ones. A good compromise a
laptop/notebook with a large screen (17") and a fast processor, and
plenty of
RAM and disk space.
Nowadays such laptops do exist. But Linux users, in particular SuSE
fans (as I am), pay a high toll.
Just take alook at the XTREME notebooks af the following website:
http://www.xtremenotebooks.com/index.php?section=include&include_type=contac
tus
You can easily figure out the cost of the Nova 476V Accelerator (AMD 3700+)
with expanded RAM
to 2GB, with 120GB HDD, Dual-layer DVD RW, with wireless and bluetooth
Its price comes to $2254
The only "defect" is that the manufacturer only supports Windows.
Now compare withthe cost of an equivalent Linux certified laptop. Take a
look
at the following website:
http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux-laptop-lc2540.html
I contacted the manufacturer and asked him for the cost of a
configuration equivalent to the above mentioned for the XTREME Nova 476V
He came up with $4747 (escluding shipping & handling). Since this
amount of money is beyond the pale (for a laptop) I resized my
configuration and asked him:
From: Maura Monville
On Sunday 11 September 2005 03:29, Maura Edelweiss Monville wrote:
Has anyone tried to install SuSe on the notebooks manufactured by XTREME.NOTEBOOKS.COM ? Their wenbsite is as follows: http://www.xtremenotebooks.com/index.php?section=include&include_type=cont a ctus
They seem to have 17" monitors and ADM fast processor and up to 2GB RAM and all sort of goodies but they do not support any Linux distribution ... sigh .... sigh ... sigh ...
Thank you for any suggestion. Maura
Hi, you don't state your problem, so my response may not be relevant:
I bought a new TPG laptop and had lots of trouble with the screen. In particular, SuSE would use the correct size as it installed, downloaded (automatically) from the net, and completed set up. Then on boot up everything would go well until suddenly a part of SuSE would say "The screen size appears to be 0x0" and proceed to use same: Ahhhhh!
Nobody responded to my posted question, so I took my laptop along to the SLUG (Sydney Linux Users' Group) where half a dozen guys played with it for four hours. We deduced that something was going wrong within RAM; so I told them that TPG have installed a cheap, crappy video card which uses up 64 MB of RAM, and they pounced on the idea that the hardware was not initiating as fast as the boot code, and that boot code was getting the RAM size before the graphics card had initialised.
So (I am sorry but I don't know how) they built a timeout delay into the boot sequence - giving the graphics card time to wind up. (Incidently, M$ Windows XP boots okay - I guess it is too slow :-)
These guys installed the latest 64 bit version of Ubuntu on my laptop. It is nice, and much cheaper than SuSE (like 100% free).
Good luck, Colin
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