Turion, baby!
Well, I have a new laptop today. Why a new laptop, you ask? What was wrong with my old one? Well, nothing was wrong with it, per se. However, since I became and amd64 dev for Gentoo, I’ve been hampered in my work by not using amd64 as my primary workstation. Instead, I had a Centrino laptop. So, I started saving up my money, and looking for deals.
What I have is a Compaq V2311US. It’s a 1.6 GHz Turion, with 60GB HD, DVD/CD-RW, 512 MB of RAM (soon to be 1 GB when I swap the RAM from my current laptop), and a 14-inch widescreen. It has that hateful broadcom wireless that all AMD laptops seem to have, so I’ll have to do something else for wireless. I have several supported PC Cards, and I have a spare ipw2100 miniPCI card (and an ipw2200 in my centrino), so I’ll manage something. Hopefully, the broadcom reverse-engineering project will work. It’s only 5.5 lbs, making it a good 2 lbs lighter than my current laptop, for which my shoulder will love me. Hopefully, the smaller screen realestate (1280×800 rather than 1680×1050) won’t be too big an issue to my workflow. Can anyone say small fonts? 
At any rate, after booting it up into Windows to make sure it all worked, I’ve nuked Windows and am installing Gentoo. Currently, I’m building gcc. Hopefully, I’ll be able to distcc it with my desktop, and get all of my normal environment built by tomorrow morning. Cross your fingers.
So far, at full load, it runs slightly cooler and slightly quieter than my P-M at full load. People have asked about battery life, but I don’t have any figures yet, as I haven’t unplugged it yet. More info later, as I get to play more.
You can pass -dpi whatever to your X server to get around broken font sizes…
Well, I also got the V2311US, and I got Gentoo on it, and I got the video and the touchpoint working (thanks for the tip on the ATI drivers).
I have a problem with multitasking. The machine seems to be totally incapable of doing more than one thing at a time. If I am compiling, the mouse is jumpy, the keyboard is not responsive and refresh takes…. forever.
I know I have only 512MB RAM, and that 128 are gone to the 200M Video card. Still - my Dell C600 (1Ghz PIII with 256 RAM) performs better at switching tasks.
Is anyone else observing this?
I certainly don’t see this, although it was bad before I booted with noapic (the clock was running double speed, and everything was slugish)
It got better after a few kernel rebuilds. Right now I am blaming DMA and some K8 options that I did not turn on.
Still using 2.6.11-r1. Tried 2.6.12-r6 and r7, but could not get X to load. fglrx causes a kernel panic. On 2.6.12 apci works great. Got powernowd to work (on 2.6.11 powernowd segfaults) . Still without X it is somewhat useless.
Using the 8.13.4 ati-drivers I got some semblance of accelaration going, but it is pretty bad still. I got 400fps on glxgears earlier, but after I finished messing with the kernels I am down to 200fps. It says that ATI is loaded… OH! It may be the double-speed time! I had noapic earlier, and I have it on now, so maybe it is calculating wrong.
I still have not managed to get ndiswrapper working with the Broadcom. I am using a Cisco Aironet 350 which came right up. I want the goodness of a built-in to 802.11g. The Aironet is only 802.11b and sticks out…
Cant wait to see your page on this laptop. I might end up puting one together as well, once I get my machine to a somewhat satisfactory condition.
8/11 Newark, DE
Hey just got this laptop. I like it a lot. I was wondering if you had any luck with the wireless mini-pci card. Some bios whitelist cards and I am hoping this one doesn’t.
So has anyone figured out a good kernel/ati-driver combo? I am still stuck with 2.6.11-r1 and 8.13.4. Acceleration does not work, and neither does power mgmt. At least resolution is native.
I’ve heard rumors that 8.13.6 has full acceleration, but I haven’t tried it yet myself.