[SGVLUG] Linux Sonoma (Centrino) Support

[Dustin]

On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, John Riehl wrote:

> actually, it is not much.  With some less than current distros, it has 
> been.  Most of what I read though, was that you had to recompile the 
> kernel.

OK, I don't really count that as a pain.

> With suse 9.3, suspend worked pretty much out of the box.  You had to 
> turn it on in the config panels.

I rarely use distros that have such things as "config panels," though. :-)

> > Screws up as in "rips the saved machine state to bloody shreds"? :-)
> 
> uh, no.  Suspend merely tells you that it doesnt have any place to 
> suspend, and doesnt do anything.

Oh.  I was imagining that you have the memory state saved to disk, then 
allocate it to MS-Windows, but the next time you boot Linux it loads the 
new filesystem data there into memory and attempts to continue from that 
(effectively random) state.  Didn't sound good. :-)

> > But anyone who actually has a Turion 64 notebook is more than welcome to
> > tell me how wrong I am. :-)
> 
> I also would like to know about the Turion64 notebook.

There don't seem to be too many around yet, but I could easily buy a
chassis and put one together for about the same price I could do a
Pentium-M.  The problem is it seems to be too new to really get a handle
on what it is like, and the Pentium-M seems to be the best design Intel
has done in a long time.

Worse, that means the Turion chipsets are very new, and since it's a more 
open architecture it doesn't have to come with a single chipset as the 
Pentium-M generally does (centrino).  I assume that would make it harder 
to determine support.

It's a shame--I would prefer to buy AMD, but unlike the case with 
operating systems I am not dogmatic enough to accept too much in the way 
of a compromise.

Dustin