[Wylug-help] Laptop Suggestions

[John Hodrien]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Aaron Crane wrote:

> For all I know Dell may offer a laptop of roughly the same weight as
> your current one, but their site seems even worse than the Lenovo/IBM
> one -- I can't see a weight indication more precise than "under 2 kg"
> on any of their laptops.

Dell have always done a good job of hiding it, despite having good weights on
their small laptops.  It's normally lurking somewhere in the technical specs
section of a laptop, somewhere less significant than the power rating of the
PSU (like I care?).

> the MacBook Air and the Asus machines look better to me.

I'll concede that the Air looks the business, but I'm surprised it's not
lighter.

> If none of those suit, you'll probably have to look at less powerful
> hardware.  That said, your tradeoffs for price/power/weight may not match
> mine.

I don't know what Smylers is like, but my 1.1GHz ULV Pentium M laptop is fine.
A good whack of RAM (1.25 in my case) still makes it a tip-top performer for
the sort of things I use it for.

> I can't offer any guarantees for the current hardware revision, but my
> Vaio doesn't seem to have any problems there, at least for showing the
> same data on both screens.  I fear you won't be able to be completely
> sure on that question unless you can find a success report from someone
> using the exact laptop model that you propose to get.

No, this does seem to be something individual designs can screw up.

> For me, something suboptimal but not showstopping.  What I'd like is
> to be able to plug an external display in and have X suddenly spread
> itself over both screens, and the reverse when I unplug the external
> display.
>
> What actually happens is that you shut down all your apps, run the
> Gnome "Screen and Graphics" preferences app, set the resolution to
> 1024×768, and restart X.  _Then_ you plug the external display in, and
> that seems to work.

Cripes, that's not ideal.  What I've done with nvidia:

Option ConnectedMonitors "DFP,CRT"

(or similar I can't remember the exact blurb for the internal screen.  I think
ATI used to refer to it as LVDS or summat).  Basically set it to always assume
that there's an external screen connected.  Then create some modes:

Option      "MetaModes" "1280x800;1280x800, 1024x768;1024x768, 1024x768"

Add in whatever other modes you want.  Then all those are selectable using
xrandr (System/Preferences/Hardware/Screen Resolution in Gnome), without
restarting X.

I'm fairly sure the nvidia driver has seen some work recently to improve
auto-detection of inputs with a running X, but I could be wrong.

The intel driver seemed to do something clever with the external-display
function button on my Dell X1, but I can't remember exactly what...

jh

-- 
"As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become
  clear that imperfection is the greatness of man."   -- Ernst Fischer