On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 03:35:06PM -0800, Ken Restivo wrote: > I may need to sell my Mac Mini and buy a laptop instead, for use live, > or just for being mobile and being able to make music without being > chained to the computer and monitor at home. Intel Mini or G4? > I want to avoid any laptop that requires proprietary video drivers-- > like NVidia-- so that there aren't interactions between the driver and > realtime mode. Also I want to avoid any laptop that isn't widely in > use for linux audio already, using jackd, and ideally using freebob > too. I had a Thinkpad R50. Everything was perfectly supported, except firewire. Firewire drives worked nicely, but firewire video devices could be problematic. Never tried firewire audio. The onboard ATI graphics are well supported by Xorg. Onboard audio is reasonably clean. I wouldn't call it pro-quality, but running the onboard output to a PA wasn't embarrassing. Now I have a Lenovo 3000 n100. Nvidia graphics. Suspend doesn't work. Hibernate doesn't work. Wireless doesn't work. Onboard audio is too noisy for me to consider ever connecting directly to a PA. Stay away from the Lenovo 3000s. I hear the newer Lenovo Thinkpads are still good if you go with Intel graphics though. If I was installing the Lenovo again, I think I would go back to 32bit instead of 64 though. > Most of the really good, cheap new laptops seem to have Intel Core > Duo's, and I'm not sure how many people beside myself are out on the > bleeding edge with Duo's. Still, whatever I'm going to buy is going to > be older and used, because that's all I can afford. I wouldn't call it all that bleeding edge. Dual core AMD and Intel chips have been around for a few years, and dual processor a lot longer. I wouldn't worry about it.
