Best Laptop for Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 05:19:23PM -0500, Ian Petersen wrote:
[snip]
> Then I tried to watch a movie on my television using the SVideo out
> port.  I have an older Acer laptop that runs Gentoo Linux and also has
> an SVideo out.  The old laptop is a little tricky and I have to boot
> it with the SVideo cable plugged in to be able to see anything on the
> TV (and, if I do, then there's nothing on the monitor).  I find this
> somewhat irritating, but I've lived with it for several years.  I
> figured, since the new laptop has SVideo out and supposedly has 100%
> hardware support, I should be able to plug it into the TV without
> rebooting.  No luck.  "Oh well," I think, "I'll just reboot with the
> TV plugged in."  No dice.  I can't get the SVideo working.   Strike
> one.
> 
> I bought this new laptop because I need a machine on which I can
> develop some resource-hungry Java stuff.  I work from home
> Monday-Thursday, but I have to go into the office on Fridays.  The old
> laptop was great until we switched from Rails to Java, so I needed a
> replacement that would allow me to be productive on Fridays.  Part of
> "being productive on Fridays" means plugging in the VGA-out port and
> working on an ergonomically-superior external monitor.  This doesn't
> work on my new machine.  Strike two.

You have to configure the nvidia drivers to tell it to use both ports
and how you want them used.  The Readme for the closed source nvidia
drivers has quite a bit of information on that.  So far my experience
even with the windows drivers is that you have to go and tell it to
enable a port before it happens.

Certainly nothing so far indicates gentoo will be an improvement.

--
Len Sorensen
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