Upgrade in $laptop

Got the team laptop upgraded from a Compaq nx6000 to a nc6000. Pretty neat toy – Pentium M 1.6 Ghz, 256MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 with 32MB Video RAM, DVD-ROM drive etc etc. The only think which went away with the old laptop was the firewire port – this kinda makes it hard to use with the external IDE box since the USB port on the converter is bust. No more DVD/CD writing for a while though.

Being a very recent model, there had to be issues with it when running an FOSS OS like Linux or FreeBSD. Issues so far,

  • Screen corruption – I randomly experience Xserver and console frame buffer corruption. This is on Fedora Core 3 with Xorg 6.8.1
  • OpenGL – No 3d support by Xorg for ATI Radeon 9600 yet. I have installed the ATI Linux proprietary driver instead. Its a pain to use 3rd party drivers but I guess I have to use it till there is a DRI one out. For the moment, it makes mixxx run fine again. Getting X accelerated on FreeBSD on this hardware will have to wait too. Sucks!
  • ACPI Suspend and resume still no go. Someday… Someway…. Getting Linux software suspend patched in to the FC kernel is too much of a PITA. Sigh!

    Otherwise, this laptop is really speedy – the faster disk probably has everything to do with it.

    Plan to install FreeBSD 5.4 as soon as it is released on the remaining free primary partition beside the clunky XP and the hard to maintain Fedora Core installations.

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    By Shanker Balan

    Shanker Balan is a devops and infrastructure freelancer with over 14 years of industry experience in large scale Internet systems. He is available for both short term and long term projects on contract. Please use the Contact Form for any enquiry.