Ax0n’s Den

So my laptop has finally kicked the bucket. Wont power up, wont anything. Because I haven’t been updating my blog, you wouldn’t know that is lacks any internal fans. You also wouldn’t know that the battery wont charge and the power brick has an after market capacitor in it, because it blew up a while back. Oh and did I mention that it like to turn off randomly by itself?

In anycase, I have decided that it’s time for a new one. My choice? The Dell Studio 17″.

• Intel Core 2 Duo T8100, 2.1GHz, 800Mhz, 3M L2 Cache
• 3GB DDR2 RAM
• 17.0″ WLED 1920×1200 Display
• ATI MOBILITY RADEON HD 3650
• 250G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
• 8X Slot Load Burner
• Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Half Mini Card
• Integrated High Definition Audio 2.0
• Integrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam
• 56 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
• Dell Wireless 370 Bluetooth Module (2.0)
• Dell Wireless 5720 EV-DO Revision A

They are telling me that it’s going to be 3 weeks before it gets here. A co-worker of mine just ordered a laptop from Dell a month back, and they told him like 3 weeks too but it only took a week to show up on his doorstep, so I am hoping the same happens for me.

I am concerned about driver support in Linux. From what I can tell, the video card looks to be supported by the proprietary ATI(AMD) drivers. The last time I used an ATI card in linux was back before ATI was releasing drivers and the FOSS drivers were not mature.

There isn’t much information on the chipset for the wireless card or sound card. I am guessing the soundcard is supported by the Intel HD Audio driver for Linux. The wireless card will be some sort of Broadcom black box. Hopefully the b43 driver will work.

The internal bluetooth and EV-DO radio are less pressing. I have a USB dongle I can use until I get the internal one working. From what I have read about the EV-DO Radios, they are basically a chuck of programmable ROM and a radio. You have to flash the ROM in Windows for your carrier, and then you connect to it like a dumb modem. Since I don’t even have a plan right now, I’m not concerned about it.