[SWLUG] Notebook recommendations

[Steve Hill]

On Mon, 14 May 2007, Jonathan Wright wrote:

> To make the most of our Beryl, going for the nVidia option would be better - 
> I know you said preferably no binary drivers, but nVidia drivers for Linux 
> are by-and-far the best available.

I was hoping the Intel chipsets would be powerful enough to run Beryl.  My 
experience with the nVidia drivers has been variable at best.

On my FX5200 card at home you have to put Beryl into AIGLX mode instead 
of nVidia mode to work around the nVidia driver's AGP aperture bug 
(causes black windows).

On the Quadro FX330 card at work then I have to set the rendering path to 
"copy" mode otherwise I get very corrupt windows and around 4 frames per 
*minute*.  Also on that machine Beryl is very unstable (no idea if thats a 
problem with the nVidia drivers or Beryl itself).

> I had an ATI card before this and there was just no comparison between the 
> driver sets!

I was quite surprised actually - I recently installed Fedora Core 6 + 
Beryl on a Thinkpad T42p with an ATI chipset.  It worked perfectly 
straight out of the box using the Free drivers and was blazingly fast 
compared to my nVidia machines.

> I've just enabled it all on mine and it's running beautifully (despite it 
> being an FX5500, although I'm thinking of upgrading :).

My FX5200 is rather slow, but I mostly put that down to running at a 
resolution of 3104x1200.

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence