Dell Inspiron 530 compatability questions before buying

[Jamon Camisso]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 11, 2007 at 03:42:22PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>>   Anybody have experience with this machine under linux?  Since my
>> 1999 Dell lasted almost 8 years, I'm willing to pay a bit extra.  Oh
>> yeah, price reduced at dell.ca by $300, expires the 16th.  I'm not
>> looking at the low-end Celeron version, but the Pentium dual core
>> processor version.
> 
> Wow a Dell laptop that lasted 8 years?  From what I read a lot of the
> Dell Inspiron laptops you are lucky if they stay working more than 6
> months past the end of warrenty.  Nice class action suits taking place
> against Dell as a result.
> 
> And you really don't want a Pentium anything.  You want a Core based
> system instead.
> 
> Currently I am starting to think Asus will be my choice for laptop
> vendor (they have been my choice of mainboard vendor for 15 years).

I built my ASUS laptop from a barebones chassis bought at College and 
Spadina (Filtech). Pick your CPU, RAM, HDD, put it all together. In 3 
years it has taken quite a few beatings but the thing has a carbon fiber 
chassis so it's lifespan won't be shortened by any abuse I throw at it.

It's seen a few Gentoo compiles, Fedoras, Suse (before it was evil), 
Ubuntu, and Debian Sarge, Etch, and now unstable. Everything has just 
worked, including the ATI video card. Can't say enough good things about 
the quality of their laptops.

>>   According to a response on the Gentoo list, the integrated "Graphics
>> Media Accelerator 3100" is well-supported.  I don't like the idea of
>> binary blobs for Nvidia that work with the current kernel, but break
>> when you update the kernel.  And as for ATI, fglrx has caused the only
>> hard lockups I have experienced in linux in the past couple of years.
> 
> Well if you don't care about 3D, nvidia's work fine with the nv driver.
> The intel works fine too, but I have no idea if the 3100 has any 3D
> support yet (some of the older ones certainly do, although fast they
> aren't).  I won't touch ATI's mobile chips either.  Too many driver
> lockups.

The radeon driver is fabulous with my 9700 mobile, I haven't had any 
trouble with it such that I just don't bother with the fglrx blob.

Jamon
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