Shiny New Laptop
After a few years of only buying laptops with Intel hardware, today I bought something totally different. It's not really what I wanted (which was an HP HDX 16t) but I get the feeling that none of these 16" HD 1080 laptops will make it to New Zealand for a while yet, and the NZ dollar has done such a nosedive recently that it's better not to wait any longer.
In the places that hold stock there seem to be some good specials around at the moment, and as the owner of a new free, open-source consulting business (i.e: a cheap bastard) I went shopping for the cheapest dual-core I could find with a half-decent screen, and I found the Asus X53K for $999 (USD$589) at Dick Smith, including a 2G ram upgrade to take it to 3G. It's entirely non-intel, with a 2GHz Turion dual-core, ATI Radeon X2300 with 1440x900 panel, Atheros AR2425 wifi and 160G HD. I'd bought a replacement 320G hard drive even before I got the laptop, so now I have a pristine, unbooted 160G hard drive with the install files for some other OS on it - no doubt I'll find a use for the disk, at least!
Since AMD got ATI to release all their chip documentation earlier this year I felt able to shell out for this, rather than the extra $100 for the model next to it, and it was nice too to get home and find that Atheros have recently released the HAL for their a/b/g chips. Which presumably means that they haven't done so for their 'n' chipsets, and I should continue to steer clear of that technology for a while yet...
I'm running Debian GNU/Linux 'Sid' on the Asus X53K and, everything pretty much just works out of the box. My installation process was to rsync the old laptop onto a new disk, and boot the new laptop from that - after compiling a new kernel more appropriate to the changed hardware.
After overcoming my own stupidity in not syncing the /dev/ underneath udev, which I easily googled my way out of, the only problem I've found so far is that the free radeon driver doesn't do 3d for me. Presumably the non-free ones would, but they won't compile against my 2.6.27 kernel so I don't know for sure. Fortunately I don't use 3d for anything so it's not a huge inconvenience to me. With 3G RAM and a fast 320G hard drive the laptop actually is an upgrade for me, too, and it has a webcam too, which I expect I'll look at in much the same way as I did the fingerprint reader on the old laptop. It will be good to finally hand that old one back to Catalyst, too, who have given me the flexibility to take my time on this.
Now to try and peel off all these stickers without damaging anything!
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Atheros have released drivers
Atheros have released drivers for the 802.11n cards. Firstly you can use
them with madwifi trunk (no releases contain the right hal). This driver
isn't spectacular, but it does the job.
Secondly, there's a new ath9k driver in Linux 2.6.27 trunk. When I used
it (a few days after it was announced) it worked but only just. I assume
it's getting better.
Yes, I can't say I bother with 3D, I use a box with an nvidia card when
I need good qualitiy OpenGL under linux (and pretend not to be a freedom
hater)
Good luck with the stickers. Benzene can work quite well on the glue
residue :-)
SR
Radeon X2300 should have 3d support with open source drivers
According to http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon there should be 3D support for the X2300 with mesa 7.1 and later (it is r500 based). If it doesn't work, you might report a bug in freedesktop.org bugzilla.
Not supported as at September 2008
Nah, looks like it's not quite ready for real time yet. X2300 must be next on the list though, because that page says:
Cards below this point do not yet (09/2008) have 3D acceleration support
# X2300 denotes a RV550 based card.
Good to know for sure, though :-)
A bit more about the Asus X53KE
Firstly, I was lucky I happened to already be running the 2.6.27 kernel. When I try and boot the laptop with the stock Debian Sid 2.6.26 kernel the wireless doesn't work, and I think quite a bit of other stuff too.
Secondly, if I enable the VESA framebuffer I can set it to mode 859, which turns out to be 1152x864 or something, but no higher. I can live with that, but I can't live with the fact that suspend to ram then does *not* work. Oh well - I rarely use console mode these days anyway, and can live without the dual tuxes on boot, especially if suspend/resume work well and I don't have to boot anyway. The radeon framebuffer doesn't work at all. I think the RV550 chipset is not supported/recognised by it.
Suspend/resume seems to be rock solid, as long as I don't have a framebuffer. With dozens of suspend/resumes so far I have yet to have a crash.
All of the fancy keyboard keys are available as ACPI events. To see what they are, I use this little snippet to log the events (/etc/acpi/log-events):
#!/bin/sh
logger -t 'acpi-allevents' "Received ACPI event =>$1<="
and then I add a triggery thing in /etc/acpi/events/allevents to call it, like this:
# /etc/acpi/events/allevents
# Called /etc/acpi/log_event to log the event when any ACPI event happens
# Optionally you can specify the placeholder %e. It will pass through the
# whole kernel event message to the program you've specified.
event=.*
action=/etc/acpi/log_event "%e"
And obviously that means I can run any script I like from the keys, as long as I run it as root. In order to make it run within my X session is a bit harder, but doable I'm sure. This article on the Thinkpad Wiki - how to get special keys to work - seems like a good place to start. In particular the acpi_fakekey program. Well with a little more searching it turns out that I just needed to install the acpi-support package to get that, which then installs all of the scripts to fake those keys for me, which is rather more than I wanted (why do I need a key to open my e-mail? it's already open! ditto for the browser...) but I guess I'll live with that. Maybe I should ask that acpi_fakekey be moved into the acpi-support-base package.
The camera was easy to get running, apparently being a standard camera using the uvcvideo module.
And that's it. I guess I just need to wait for the next X release to get some improved support for my radeon X2300 (RV550) and I'll be good to go.
Oh, and also if I press the magic key to disable the wireless, it's disabled so thoroughly it never comes back to life. So probably 2.6.28 will be needed for that one, too.
Cheers,
Andrew.
How many days did DSE take to ship this?
Hey man
I have bought this same laptop and I was googling for it. Ordered it a couple of days ago, still not heard from DSE, it said they'd ring me to confirm the order. I rang and the dude said its low on stock and they will have to see if any stores have one otherwise they wont charge my CC.
Anyway know any other similar good deals anywhere if this falls through for me :-/
ps. Im interested in running LINUX on this machine too :D if i get it.
Er, you think I could wait for shipping?
It was hard enough getting me to wait in the store...
I bought it over the counter at the local DSE in Porirua (they're out of stock now), and I would recommend you go into the big blue room and waddle on down there yourself, because their website now says:
The Z53E model (for $100 more) also looks good (intel chipset, still 1440x900 screen). I'm pretty sure these are being RAM upgraded because that other OS doesn't make it's authors look good on only 1G of RAM - so make sure you get the XC4183-RAM2 product or you won't get the extra 2G RAM. Also, it comes with a laptop bag (I gave mine to Heather) and a travel mouse (not wireless), and a bunch of coasters labelled 'recovery disk' and 'nero' and stuff.
Anyway, drop me an e-mail if you want any help getting Linux running on it. Possibly I was a wee bit lucky to be already running the 2.6.27 kernel...
Good luck,
Andrew.
LOL i just bought the last
LOL i just bought the last (display) model @ DSE porirua last Tuesday 21st oct.
Im leaving vista on it, was gonna put XP on but dont wanna soil it. Mental note that the first partition (approx 7Gb) is actually the drivers for the OEM Vista installation so if you delete the initial partition, you cant put Vista back on.
Not that u would take that path from linux.
P.S wot so great about linux, too much hassle for wot. if it aint broke dont touch.
I can still go back!
I can still go back, if I want, since I've got the original hard drive in a box somewhere if I need it, and I guess it still has that 7G partition on there...
It's pretty unlikely though, since the last time I had a Windows installation on my main computer was back around the time they released Windows '98. In fact yesterday I was looking for a Windows computer running to test something out (I wanted to confirm that a problem wasn't just because I was running on Linux - it wasn't), and had to ask a friend to test it for me on a computer he can remote into :-)
The main benefit I get from running Linux is that my computer software is designed and built by people who love doing it, and enjoy doing it, rather than being designed by people who enjoy the money I get when I buy their software, and built by people who enjoy the money they get.
Of course the fact that there are so many awesome free and open software packages around doesn't hurt either.
It's not just Linux which is free software. All of the software running on my laptop is written and produced by people like me, and is freely available to use and improve.
So once I have finished installing Linux (which usually takes under an hour) I have a fully functional computer stuffed with tools I can use to do some work, not a semi-functional computer, stuffed with marketing and advertising, just ready to install some useful and expensive software onto.
So if you want to see how the other half lives, give me a call and if you give me a blank CD or DVD I can turn it into a free bootable CD (or DVD) of Linux that you can try out and see for yourself what amazing software is available, for free.
So no: I don't find Linux to be a hassle at all. The opposite is true, when I find myself faced with a Microsoft taxed computer and I have to haul out my rusty skills to deal with it. Usually a system that only gives me one desktop, a minimal command-line, and a suite of programs that do 30% of what I want, so that I'll pay money for the full-function versions.
Cheers,
Andrew.