[LAU] new laptop redux

[Mark Knecht]

BTW - I'm not suggesting only installing a single distro. you have
enough disk space to install a few and try out support for the machine
in each, just to see how it goes. Ain't grub grand? ;-)

- Mark

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:38 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Dave,
>   Sounds like you're making pretty good progress. Congrats You'll
> have to report back some benchmark values when you get it set up to
> your liking.
>
>   I cannot speak to Ubuntu. I've never run it. However I've run
> Gentoo 64-bit for a few years now. All I can say is that while 64-bit
> Linux works, and works well, there are a lot of real world limitations
> in terms of accessing media from the web. While no where near as bad
> as they used to be you will likely run into issues with Java and Flash
> under 64-bit, and the decoders for things like Windows media file
> types are almost always a bit more difficult than on our 32-bit
> machines. Again, no where near as bad as they used to be, but not as
> good as the 32-bit versions.
>
>   Even though I'm purchasing 64-bit processors these days I'm not
> installing 64-bit anymore. I have one machine to test but 32-bit the
> rest of the way around. There's nothing about your system specs that
> demands 64-bit (IMO) so consider whether you really want it.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:28 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips at woh.rr.com> wrote:
>> Greetings, fellow LAUyers,
>>
>> To recap: I recently purchased a Hewlett-Packard G60-125NR notebook, a
>> machine based on an AMD Turion 2 GHz CPU, with 3G RAM, a 250G hard disk,
>> and an on-board nVidia 8200M (essential for my work). Sound comes from
>> an nVidia chipset based on the dreaded Intel HDA codec.
>>
>> My experience so far has been illuminating. I first tried to install the
>> 64-bit versions Ubuntu 8.10 and Arch Linux, both of which froze during
>> the installation procedure. Some research indicated that the likely
>> culprit was the Atheros wifi driver, so I tried the brokenmodules option
>> but still got no joy. I found reports that Mandriva and OpenSUSE 11.0
>> worked, and since OpenSUSE downloaded faster I gave it a whirl. The
>> brokenmodules option seemed to do the trick, and after a while I had a
>> new Open SUSE 11.0 (64-bit) installed on the machine. Alas, I couldn't
>> get the official nVidia driver to work, which left me with an
>> unsatisfactory vesa framebuffer display. A little more Googling revealed
>> that indeed some users were enjoying Ubuntu 8.10 on this hardware, so I
>> tried again, this time with the i386 installer. Voila, in short order I
>> had a new Ubuntu system installed, with working 3D acceleration from the
>> nVidia closed-soure driver.
>>
>> On to the audio. Intrepid doesn't create an audio group by default, so I
>> had to do the dance to add that group and myself to its users. That got
>> me to realtime JACK performance, though I'm still suffering excessive
>> xruns at 17.4 ms latency (-p 256 -n 3 -r 44100). I don't plan to use
>> that chipset as a primary audio interface anyway (I'm in the market for
>> a USB interface now), so for the present time I'll live with it. Btw,
>> the audio device is on IRQ 19, probably not the optimal position.
>>
>> I have one more permissions problem to resolve (access to /dev/nvidiactl
>> is forbidden to the normal user) then I believe I'll have my target
>> machine, i.e. a portable box that can run AVSynthesis (OpenGL + Csound).
>> Btw, I've already scrapped the GNOME desktop in favor of fluxbox (of
>> course), but I'd certainly like to hear from other Ubuntu users
>> regarding any other recommended streamlining. For instance, I'd like to
>> junk pulseaudio and compiz completely but I'm not sure how to do it.
>>
>> One question: Should I go ahead and install the UbuntuStudio packages ?
>> I have the rt-kernel, it seems I could just go ahead and install the
>> rest. Any reasons not to do so ?
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> dp
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>