[SGVLUG] Linux Sonoma (Centrino) Support

[Dustin]

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, John Riehl wrote:

> I have installed linux on a Dell precision M70, which is built on the 
> sonoma chipset, according to a couple of articles.

Looks that way.  Somewhat similar to what I had in mind, in fact, 
depending on how much I end up spending.

> 9.2, then later upgraded to Suse 9.3  (with 9.3, suspend works from the 
> stock distro, appropriately patched).

Yeah, my impression was that suspend is a pain to get working.  I'm not 
sure what distro I'll run on it, though.

> only snag:  the modem is a winmodem.

No surprise.  I'm not sure how much I need that anyway, but I was prepared 
for that to be the one thing that won't work.

> user later reallocated the swap space as another windows disk 
> (dual-boot).  this screws up suspend.

Screws up as in "rips the saved machine state to bloody shreds"? :-)

> The m70 is a fairly nice laptop, a "mobile workstation". It is still 
> 32bit, though. get the nvidia drivers.

It's fairly close to what I have in mind, if I want to spend that much.  I 
don't mind the 32-bit thing, since AFAICT the Pentium M is one of the 
nicer chips Intel ever made.

I'm usually an AMD person and would consider a Turion-based machine, but
it's awefully new to know what Linux support is like and also I'm not sure
if the chip and supporting chipsets are sorted yet.  Sad truth seems to be 
that while AMD was whipping them on the desktop Intel was really getting 
the mobile computing thing solid.  The only bits of info I've found 
suggest that Turion performance was good but not necessarily better than a 
Pentium M, and the power consumption wasn't so great.

But anyone who actually has a Turion 64 notebook is more than welcome to
tell me how wrong I am. :-)

Of course, if I research and procrastinate long enough then everything 
will change by the time I buy anyway. :-)

Dustin