Laptop Recommendation

[Mallory van Achterberg]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 08:05:25AM +1300, Kent Fredric wrote:
> On 24 January 2012 08:01, Mallory van Achterberg
> <stommepoes at stommepoes.nl> wrote:
> > Many of the cheaper laptops I would have considered ran Optimus.
> > Optimus is great... if you run Windows.
> > http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/09/nvidia-there-is-no-optimus-support-for.html
> 
> I have an optimus laptop, and its not that bad. It takes a bit of
> effort at present to get it working, but when you manage to get it
> going, it works like a charm, and almost as good as it is in windows.
> 
> https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee
> 
> ^ this runs as a daemon backgrounded with a seperate X session running
> on the GPU.
> 
> And then  to run something accelerated, you have to prefix starting it
> with a special command
> 
>   optirun ~/path/to/minecraft.sh
> 
> for example.
> 
> Its not supported stock anywhere yet that I can see, but there is
> certainly hope.
> 
> Its certainly bloody good considering Nvidia are refusing to support
> it on Linux.
> 
> -- 
> Kent

It wasn't just the idea that Optimus wasn't going to support Linux,
but also the many reports on forums where people had gotten machines
before they knew better. Some folks had graphics while others had
something horrible and unusable. Since I once was in a store and we
used an Ubuntu 6 disc to check support and we saw absolutely no
graphics at all (the machine was an MSIE I believe, and OpenSuse ended
up having no problems at all with it) and that's scary if you're
ordering a machine online rather than having it in your hands in a
shop.

-Mallory