Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:52:01 -0700 From: Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD and hardware?? Message-ID: <20081118185201.GA4787@kokopelli.hydra> In-Reply-To: <200811181251.07972.fbsd.questions@rachie.is-a-geek.net> References: <7f8a05a80811171609h2f5742cfo2ae003415a99e45f@mail.gmail.com> <49227279.8040607@infracaninophile.co.uk> <20081118122350.X84157@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> <200811181251.07972.fbsd.questions@rachie.is-a-geek.net>
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--SUOF0GtieIMvvwua Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:51:07PM +0100, Mel wrote: >=20 > Not anymore. They were when it was still IBM. Some in-depth discussion he= re: > http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-mobile/2008-July/010831.html Well, that's disappointing. My current laptop is a Thinkpad R52, from just after the sale to Lenovo but while production was still going on in IBM facilities here in the States. It's a great piece of equipment and, aside from the fact that I made the mistake of getting the model with an ATI graphics adapter rather than an Intel adapter, it has perfectly suited my needs. I've been a long-time fan of Thinkpads, and I haven't found another laptop I like nearly as much. Even the feel of the keyboard is better than that of any other line of laptops I've encountered. I wondered if there might be dropping production value issues when the PC division of IBM was sold off to Lenovo. I'm pretty disappointed to discover that was probably the case. Another R52 purchased for my significant other, a year after acquiring this laptop, has seemed to be exactly as good as this one, with one exception: while the keyboard feel is still better than that of any non-Thinkpad I've ever encountered, it feels just slightly more flimsy and cheap than this Thinkpad's keyboard. I'm pretty sure that second R52 was manufactured in a Lenovo facility that was *not* inherited from IBM, and I wonder if that might be why the keyboard has that different feel. >=20 > And of course, there's: > http://www.ixsystems.com/products/bsd-laptop.html I just spoke to a representative from iXsystems about the Invincibook. It sound very promising. My only complaint so far (having not had a chance to check out how the keyboard feels, how heavy it is, how hot it gets during operation, and so on) is that it's only planned to provide a touchpad as an integrated pointing device. One of the surprising benefits of Thinkpads over the years has been the trackpoint, in part because I don't have to break contact between my thumbs and the spacebar when using the pointing device (I'm a Vim user), and in part because with touchpads the heels of my hands occasionally brush across the thing causing "interesting" problems with mouse pointer behavior while I'm typing. I'm also not too keen on the relative lack of mouse cursor precision with a touchpad. If it's all it promises to be, though, the Invincibook will probably be worth the sacrifice of the trackpoint, especially considering the apparent drop in production quality for Thinkpads. In the conversation with the iXsystems representative, by the way, I was told that the major holdup at the moment for Invincibooks going into production is ACPI support -- of course. I'm not terribly surprised, since ACPI seems to *always* be the bugbear of laptop support. I'm pretty keen on the idea of finally having a laptop that can suspend to RAM and, even more importantly for my purposes, to disk. I'm willing to wait until they get that part right, because "hibernation" is kind of a "killer feature" for me -- or would be, if someone would finally get it right. I suppose one could say that it works just fine on my Thinkpad, with the caveat that it fails to come back from suspension to either RAM or disk, but that kinda defeats the purpose. Anyway . . . I started out with my two cents on the matter, and ended up rambling about a bunch of tangential nonsense. I think that means it's time to close up this email. --=20 Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] print substr('Just another Perl hacker', 0, -2); --SUOF0GtieIMvvwua Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (FreeBSD) iEYEARECAAYFAkkjDtEACgkQ9mn/Pj01uKWfBACfbyvC4uk3mVSEzWZbIeXp5Gvw bLgAoPCpsS4riQ+Vk1p2jr34ODhQnz28 =5/3+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --SUOF0GtieIMvvwua--
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