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I recently found out that there’s a laptop for only USD$150! The more interesting part is it’s running Fedora Linux. The specs of the laptop as follows:

Intel® Celeron 1.5 GHz CPU
14″ Widescreen X-bright LCD
256 MB Ram memory
40 GB Hard Drive
802.11g Wireless LAN
Optimized Linux operating system
Pre-installed office and multimedia applications

I think it’s difficult to find even second hand laptops for this cheap here in Lowyat, KL. They ship internationally, so I’m gonna see if I can get one of those. Will be an extra machine to be entertained with!

Here’s the link Medison Celebrity Laptop

I’ve been using thinkpads since 2005. I have used R50, R50e, R51, R51e, R52 and lastly R60 models along the way. All the models served me well during that time, they never failed, the hardware was just tough for a guy like me.

I’ve tried almost all kinds of linux distributions on them, I even give it a shot and install Mac OS Tiger on my last R60 Thinkpad. This was a great exploration and I had my first experience using OS X. I was quite happy with the performance, although I couldn’t manage to install wireless card(ipw3945) I could after some tricks use my built-in network card.

I was, I’m sure as all of the thinkpad users, afraid that since IBM sold the PC business line to Lenovo Group the quality of the products will go down. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month Dell announced their partnership with Ubuntu, now finally the first batch of PCs featuring preloaded Ubuntu Linux is being sold at Dell’s Open site. So, let’s look at what they are offering? Currently they have 2 desktop PCs and 1 laptop. Desktop configurations as follows:
Dimension E520 N – $599
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E4300 (1.8GHz, 800 FSB)
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™

XPS 410 N – $849
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E4300 (2MB L2 Cache,1.8GHz,800FSB)
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz – 2 DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™

and laptop configuration:

Inspiron E1505 N – $599
Intel® Pentium® dual-core proc T2080(1MB Cache/1.73GHz/533MHz FSB
Ubuntu Edition version 7.04
512MB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 2 DIMM
80GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive

These prices are for the default configurations, if you opt you can go for additional upgrades.

I think for the home and office user the specs are quite reasonable. But for power users, developers and such these specs must be upgraded.

Recently my company bought a few laptops from Compaq.  Two of them are Compaq Presario V3010AU.  The laptop comes with AMD Turion Dual Core CPU which was very new to me.  To this day I still have to deal with only Intel processors and specifically IBM Thinkpads.  So, it was quite interesting and a challenge to have Compaq laptops.  Besides having brand new AMD processor it has DVD burner, a very cool Altec Lansing built-in speakers, SD-MS-MMC-XD Card reader(hell knows what kind of cards are they), 3 USB ports, wireless (of course!) and some other cool stuff.

The first thing that attracts is the shiny glossy design with a wide screen.  The other noticeable thing is the buttons, it’s kinda new approach to design the buttons that way.  However I find it uncomfortable.  For instance, you can’t feel the volume of pressure when pressing the buttons.

The first thing I did was to install FreeBSD.  I failed miserably.  After a quick google I found out it can be installed with some patches.  So, why not.  I gave it another try.  Here’s how chfl4gs installed FreeBSD on this laptop.  Since it isn’t for my use I skipped installing FreeBSD and installed Ubuntu on it instead.  Ubuntu, as I had expected, runs just right out of the box – thanks to Debian Linux and Ubuntu Linux teams!

After 2-3 weeks of using it I did not find it more powerful then my thinkpad but again this is a rough review since I did not test it in detail.

Ok, after my first post on my brand new blog, let me write about my beloved laptop.

It’s a Thinkpad R60. It has Intel Centrino Duo T2300 1.66GHz, 2MB cache, 667MHz, 945GM, 1256MB RAM, 60GB HDD and I upgraded to DVD-RW.  It has no bluetooth or infrared, but it has – as any of the decent modern laptops – WiFi.

The reason we choose this model among other Lenovo IBM Thinkpads was it does not come with any OS (if we don’t count FreeDOS).  This way I’m allowed to run whatever I want without any limitations.  I have tried almost all the popular Linux/BSD distros so far on this laptop and currently I have a strip down of Ubuntu linux with XFCE 4-4.4.0.

I will, in the future, posts my experience installing and configuring various distros and softwares on this laptop.