Re: [SLUG] DIY laptop

From: Mario Lombardo (mario@alienscience.com)
Date: Mon Jun 25 2007 - 14:18:50 EDT


On 6/25/07, Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net> wrote:
>
> Eben King wrote:
>
> > Has anybody done the "build your own laptop" thing? What did you
> > think of the end result? Did the case seem of solid construction?
> > Was it intricate to (dis)assemble? How's the battery life?
>
>
> I bought an MSI-1013 chassis last year and tricked it out with
> components. The result was an overpriced laptop with whitebox
> performance, some serious IRQ issues, and a bunch of heat.
>
> The biggest pain was the MSI-1013's BIOS, which has a broken ACPI DST
> table, functionally crippling ACPI and causing much jumping through
> hoops to load an initrd based DST which still left me with a
> non-suspendable laptop (due to the ATI fglrx driver and various other
> chipset dependencies).
>
> The IRQ issues were horrible up until around 2.6.19, just before I moved
> to my macbook. With 2.6.20 kernels, it seems to hold together well
> enough now to run the fglrx driver without eating itself right away.
>
> The heat issues were solvable with a little heat-fan-tray thing, but
> made things a bit cumbersome.
>
> My suggestion to you is to focus on purchasing a laptop that you _know_
> will suspend cleanly with linux without too much effort to get it to
> that point. That usually means decent support for said hardware with
> your favorite linux distribution.
>
> Today, I'm using a core2-duo Macbook now, with OS/X, and I'm not looking
> back. Not that OS/X doesn't have its own flaws.
>
> At least it's not Vista.
>
> - Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------

I know this follow-up is teetering on OT. I did the same thing. What Mac
support groups have you found in the area? I remember BAMUG. I want to run
more opensource applications with the Mac and run Linux in a VM since it's
quite tolerant doing so. I still use apt. My biggest reason to go Mac was
to run three operating systems. One cannot have enough operating systems :)

/mario

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