[conspire] July 11th CABAL meeting cancelled

[Mark Weisler]

On Jun 27, 2013, at 12:24 PM, Rick Moen wrote:

> Deirdre and I are going to be in Wellington, New Zealand on Saturday,
> July 11th, so there will be no CABAL meeting that day.
> 
> 
> A few words to sum up the 'I bought this computer and have problems
> getting driver support for its video|wireless|ethernet on my distro'
> problem, because people keep coming here with it.

I just want to add a general comment about acquiring computers that are good with Linux.
One way to research this topic is to learn what computer models are used by Linux resellers and then buy that model of computer either from the reseller or elsewhere.
Los Alamos Computers is an example of a dealer putting Linux on new computers for sale.

http://laclinux.com/en/Start
They offer notebook and workstation computers.
Note that they are now offering Lenovo computers. I've used probably two dozen models of Lenovo in a mix of notebook, workstation, and server that found them just fine for Linux.

Another minor point: the cost difference between a good quality computer, such as the ones used by Los Alamos, and something cheap is about $.25 a day (25 cents) over the course of a four year life. My experience is that a quality computer is less hassle and therefore "less expensive" than cheap ones.
-- 
Mark Weisler
PGP Key ID 68E462B6
PGP Key fingerprint  87D5 A77B FC47 3CC3 DFF0  586D 23FF F8B4 68E4 62B6



> 
> (But yes, no criticism whatsoever intended of Ken or the several
> generous people who stepped forward to answer the question he asked,
> which wasn't how to support his existing ATI chip but what video card to
> get.)
> 
> o  Brand-new is risky.  Brand-new and bottom-dollar, more so.
> (You can rely on whatever Fry's is pushing to be both.)
> 
> o  Getting help requires accurate chipset identity information.
> Look closely at any alleged chipset information from, especially, HP or
> Dell, because they lean towards marketing names rather than real ones.
> How do you tell the difference?  Well, um, just look at these:
> 
>  ATI Vision
>   vs.
>  AMD Radeon HD7560D
> 
> Isn't it pretty obvious?
> 
> o  When in doubt, running 'lspci' from a live CD distro is pretty
> definitive about what your chipsets _really_ are.
> 
> o  Don't forget, if distro release n doesn't support a brand-new
> chipset, such that you need to retrofit some proprietary-driver as
> fallback, odds are that release n+1 will have open-source support
> out of the box.
> 
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