Laptop Advice

Taavi Burns taavi-LbuTpDkqzNzXI80/IeQp7B2eb7JE58TQ at public.gmane.org
Thu Feb 26 00:16:50 UTC 2004


On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 06:56:45PM -0500, Ian Goldberg wrote:
> > You can always put Linux on it if OSX _really_ gets your goat.  I tried
> > it just to see, and it ran more smoothly than I would have expected...
> > but still less smoothly than OSX.  ;)
> 
> Warning: having recently been in the same boat, we found that the
> wireless cards in the newer Mac laptops will *not* work under Linux.
> Since wireless is important to you, make sure you _don't_ get the models
> with the Airport Extreme card.  (The older Airport (not Extreme) cards
> are reported to work fine.)

Good point, and one that I'd entirely forgotten as my PowerBook has
an older 11MBps AirPort card.  Broadcomm are a bunch of wankers it seems.

My curiosity is piqued by this article, though:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Macintosh/Q_20801546.html

As of kernel 2.6.3 there is MiniPCI Aironet 350 support in the mainline,
though it requires older firmware revisions to work as far as I know.
The card works fine with the newer driver in my Thinkpad under Linux.
I'd want to be triple-sure that you can put one of these Cisco cards
into the laptop, though.  The IBM laptops will only accept certain
wireless cards due to FCC regulations (they will NOT boot without a
card the BIOS is happy with).

> Some other things, like VGA out, also don't work under Linux.

Never tried.  Then again, I have yet to get spanning to work on my
Thinkpad either.  ;)  (I'm pretty sure it's an obscure configuration
issue, though, by the behaviour I get; it acts like it understands
the nature of the hardware)

-- 
taa

   A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an
   "intellectual"--find out how he feels about astrology.
      - Robert A. Heinlein
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