[dundee] Linux Laptop any recommendations?

[Andrew Clayton]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:53:13 +0100, Colin Brough wrote:

> 
> Dells are normally fine - have a couple of year old Inspiron with
> Ubuntu on it fine. Have lost the wireless on a couple of occasions
> when I upgraded distro rather than fresh installed (non-free driver).
> More recently (6 months ago) Dell desktop (I know, not what you are
> interested in) shipped with a Gigabit ethernet controller that isn't
> yet supported. 64 bit can still be a bit of an issue, so suggest

Are you referring to Linux's 64bit support being an issue? Linux has
been doing 64bit since about the mid 90's! (Alpha), IIRC It was also
64bit on the UltraSPARC before Solaris was.

> resist any temptation to move beyond 4Gb RAM!

With a 32bit kernel, even then you've got a problem. You'd have 3x as
much ZONE_HIGHMEM (everything above about 896MB) as ZONE_NORMAL, and
when your out of ZONE_NORMAL it doesn't matter how much ZONE_HIGHMEM
you've got. And the more high memory you have, the more low memory is
needed to map it. The kernel can only directly access ZONE_NORMAL. You
can easily OOM your machine even if you have plenty of high memory free.

Funny though. This is a current topic for me, as people still insist on
doing 32bit installs on a 64bit box (we're talking x86_64 here) without
fully understanding the implications.

Long story short. If you have a 64bit machine, install a 64bit OS.
Don't cripple the thing.

I think this is something that a lot of people are quite unaware of.

Cheers,
Andrew