On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 01:20 -0400, Ben Taylor wrote: > Kaiwai Gardiner wrote: > > On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 21:49 -0700, Thomas Preisler wrote: > > > >> Hi, > >> > >> I'm buying a new laptop to run Open Solaris on and wonder if anyone can > >> recommend a particular brand/model? How about a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ645P4? It > >> seems to work well with Nevada build #86. > >> > >> > > I'm getting a Thinkpad T61p (hopefully tomorrow), which apparently runs > > Linux/OpenSolaris/etc fairly well. personally, I wouldn't touch a vaio > > if it were the last computer on earth - chocked to the brim with > > proprietary garbage, and certaintity something will go wrong. > > > > > +1 about the Vaio. > > here's my punchlist of things to look for: > > 1) NVidia graphics. you can find some laptops like Asus and > Alienware with highend 7950 and 8800 chipsets. You can > also find things like the 6150M, 7150M and some 8x00m > chipsets. Then Intel. ATI is starting to get good support > from the radeon driver and some advanced chipsets > (R500-R600) are getting support from the radeonhd > driver (and I hear that our xf86-ati driver is pulling some > of that support as well, given that Suse is driving > radeonhd and Redhat is doing ati...) but R500-600 is > just getting some 2d acceleration, and 3d is probably > some months off.
The one bundled with the one I've ordered ( Thinkpad t61p 6457-C74, which has a Quadro - apparently it runs pretty well; from what I understand the universities and lenovo in NZ did a deal in terms of a product line that suited the needs of students - the t61p being popular with engineers; especially those who run Linux/UNIX (which funny enough, when I bought it and found I was going to run OpenSolaris, they thought I was an engineer - I'm studying Philosophy + Religious Studies). > 2) Wifi: Atheros or Intel 4965. Avoid Broadcom like the plague Agreed. Not just because of the fact that they refuse to work with the opensource community - their products are just plain crappy; those who are currently having problems with their MacBook and lack of wireless stability - the new wireless chip is Broadcom, before that, they used to use Atheros. Intel 4965 looks pretty good; I'm running a Atheros based PCI card in my desktop - Netgear WPN311; works wonderfully; not a single dropped connection. On the topic of wireless networking - is there an eta on the next phase of nwam being updated? its a nightmare when one changes the router password and one is forced to re-install the whole operating system because there is no way to remove the old setting for the router. > 3) Intel Pro/1000, Realtek 8169, or other GigE parts supported > by Solaris/OpenSolaris or Murayama Masayuki. > Attansic is not supported. Avoid this if at all possible. Personally I'd go 100% Intel all the way; avoid any company that uses frankenstein combinations of hardware. > 4) Sound. if it's not supported, there's likely support > to be found in 4Front's OpenSound System > > The only thing I'm not really clear on is how good our SATA > support is with laptops, as more and more laptops are rolling > out with SATA disks. The SATA controller support list > is not something I've really looked over. Anything intel is pretty much supported - as long as one doesn't go and choose something that is weird and exotic, it should work. Matthew
