Laptop causes Labour of Love

I’ve ported the XFree86 Synaptics touchpad driver to GPM. I’ve spent too many hours trying to diagnose the VT switch bug and finally fixed it with the help of Michel Daenzer. Now I’m trying to get the Radeon to survive a suspend-to-disk and resume whilst in DRI mode. I can suspend and resume (with swsusp) out of X successfully if I’m not using DRI. With DRI I resume into a frozen X.

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Toe matj toe sei, not enaf taim!

The laptop has arrived. It’s big, it’s bad and it’s a bit cranky, which is why I’ve decided to call it Dr Evil. It racks up a pretty respectable 1700 to 1800 FPS with glxgears and the bleeding edge DRI tree Radeon drivers. There is still a (known) problem w.r.t. switching to a VT and back which I’ve documented here. I will let you know if/when this is resolved. I am planning to generate more documentation in the form of a mini-review and of course a Linux howto for this laptop: stay tuned.

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Aaaack…

Yes boys and girls, the bitch of a motherboard (MSI-694D dual FC-PGA) in my work machine went tits up last week. I never trusted the regulator on that thing: if the CPUs were under an oscillating load, one could see small fluctuations on the screen in time with the load. This was the case even when it was new, but do you think any of the suppliers took my complaints seriously?

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Bliss.

I finally broke down and ordered that laptop: Promedion (Clevo) 5600 with Northwood P4 1.8GHz CPU, 256MB DDR ram, 30G HDD, 64MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, 15″ 1400×1050 TFT, 3 year on-site. When I get the thing, which should be in a week or so, I’ll make sure to write up a detailed review and document the laptop’s transcendence to the next level of computer consciousness (i.e. the Linux installation). Fortunately I didn’t have to pay the Microf*ck tax (the forced inclusion of a Microslop OS) like with so many other mainstream notebooks.

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More 5600 info

I found this posting on groups.google.com, bless its heart. It’s very positive about the Clevo 5600 and mentions that it’s also marketed as the Fosa 5600, Prostar 5694 and the Area 51 gaming laptop by AlienWare. I’d been drooling about the Area 51 before, but at that time I didn’t know what the Clevo looked like, so I didn’t recognise it.

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