[Gllug] London laptop recommendations

[Christopher Currie]

On Sun, 10 Jun 2007 10:41:02 +0100
 "Peter Childs" <peterachilds at gmail.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [Gllug] London laptop recommendations

>On 04/06/07, Mike Brodbelt <mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Nik Clayton wrote:
> > Hi all
> >
> > [ not subscribed, I'd appreciate a cc: on replies ]
> >
> > Can anyone recommend a laptop for running Kubuntu that'll be easy to
> > obtain in London,
> Thinkpad X60/X61 should cover all those except the trackpad, I think. My
>   X40 certainly does, and I'm pretty sure the X60/X61 has support that's
> as good. They also have Intel graphics and Intel wireless if you get the
> right model, so no messing around with binary only drivers.
>
>I've been looking at Laptops too, I've been looking at Novatech, Revo Max,
>does anyone have any experience of if and how well this works with Linux,

Just a thanks to all on this list who offered various kinds of moral support for my decision to buy a Thinkpad x41 and take it to  Canada and the US. (I got mine from the Linux Emporium with Ubuntu/Kubuntu 6.0x installed). It was not stolen, despite a hairy moment at Detroit en route from Ontario.

The wifi worked pretty faultlessly in spite of the weird connection schemes of various hotels, motels, and campuses (none offered more than WEP security between the laptop and the router, and several didn't even provide that. In one motel, you had to sign a form saying all your data belonged to the motel chain:-)) I was therefore unable to risk some online bookings.

smtp connections for outgoing email were erratic. Normally my isp requires a userid and password. Some of the wifi routers claimed that the isp would not accept the connection; i could sometimes send mail *without* a password but not *with* one. At the next motel I would find that the isp was again insisting on it...

The small size &  light weight, and particularly the ability to separate the dock from the laptop, were really useful on the move. With six flights altogether, the separate scanning requirement at airport security would have been a real hassle with a big laptop.

I was interested that Digikam and Konqueror under KDE did not work for pulling photos over from my digital camera in the evening (I use those on the desktop PC with SuSE, now 10.2), and so I tended to use Gnome for that. (The KDE transfers would hang).

Digikam was better (less clumsy than Nautilus) for managing the photos once they had been copied to the laptop.

The only serious tech problem I've had with it has been transferring photos from my (motorola V3) mobile phone with Bluetooth. Obex file pull doesn't work properly (the KDE popup that should ask for a PIN doesn't, so the phone reports an invalid PIN & the connection times out). Using 'move' or copy' from the phone, however, works without a PIN, even with security set to auto in hcid.conf.

Anyway, orange mobile phones (even quad band) don't work in eastern Canada. Rogers Wireless has a monopoly and obviously has no deal with some European providers. I've not had this problem in US.
-- 
Christopher Currie	ccurrie at usa.net

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