11 Nov
2008
11 Nov
'08
12:26 p.m.
On Tuesday November 11 2008 16:49:54 Dave Phillips wrote:
Hi Dave,
the NVIDIA thing could cause some trouble.
I own a Packard Bell notebook that has NVIDIA graphics adapter onboard. The
problem is the driver for it. You can choose from either an x-org driver (nv)
which does not support dual head (so one screen only) and does not support
3D. The latter might not be an issue for You, but You can get 3D only while
using a proprietary binary NVIDIA driver. And that is something that might
cause trouble with real time for audio, though I myself have not noticed any
issues related to that so far.
Other than that it would be interesting to see what kind of onboard sound the
HPs have (we all remember long intel-hda threads), even if You say You will
not need it.
You might want to give sidux a try. It is a debian sid type distro that comes
as a live-CD/DVD version and can be installed on harddisc really easily. It
is fast and there is a guy nicknamed makke who prepares RT kernels that can
be installed via apt-get, so no hassle with kernel finetuning. And another
guy has prepared dssi-vst packages ;-)
Sidux comes with everything You need, boots really fast and You can check the
HP notebook's hardware with it as well.
Kind regards,
Crypto.
I will say
that I like the screen a lot. It's a 17" wide screen and
looks quite nice playing movies. It's an AMD/nvidia box like the one
you're talking about, although likely not the same model as I got mine
18 months ago.
Pretty close though. The hd is much larger on the machine I'm considering. I would personally NEVER buy a laptop without
first at least
booting a Gentoo install CD, and likely 2 or 3 others, to ensure that
it can see all the hardware. Once the install CD has booted you can
run something like lspci and get readings on what hardware is in the
box. Check to see that you're getting full speed from the disk drives
as that's probably the most critical for making the machine useful
early on. If you don't get full speed disks don't buy it unless you
are certain you can get chip set support later on.
Ah, that one has me stumped. How do I check for full speed operations ?
With hdparm or something else ?
I figured I'd slip a Dyne live disc in the thing to see if everything
works. I also have a 64 Studio live disc to take along. If you want or need clarification on any of
this contact me online or
off.
Many thanks (again), Mark. :)
Best,
dp