[PD] OT: any advice on HP notebook for PD visuals?

[carmen]

> i cannot reproduce this.
> the only closed-source drivers you usually will come across are graphics card and w-lan (see 
> below). i never had any problems with any other component on AMD-based systems (even if the 
> mb-chipset is by nvidia, you will get everything to run with a stock (GPL) kernel)

ive got the AMD version of Frank's laptop:

-  for the first 9 months of owning it, the clock ran twice as fast, until a 3 line patch was fianlly rolled into the kernel. 
-  Ingo's RT kernel either freezes directly after grub launches it, or
-  Ingo's RT kernel panics with ACPI issues during the boot process
-  it is virtually impossible to get the proprietary ATI video drivers working
-  it is virtually impossible to get 3D acceleration,or fully working 2D with any driver:
  * free driver goes black screen and system unresponsive until hard power cycle when DRI/DRM/GLX loads
  * proprietary driver won't compile+depmod+modprobe+actuallyWork unless you know the magical old version of Xorg and kernel to downgrade to (and proably break other packages on the system in the process
  * free driver can't use the VGA port. well it can, but the display is garbled (at the driver level - the mouse cursor moves around, but its rainbow vertical stripes on 16x16 repeating-blocks background)

luckily i got the barebones version, so the Intel wireless card i put in works great.

i'd definitely get the Intel next time. :) i really had no idea, and had plenty of fine experiences with AMD on winXP and at the time they were the only 64bit around, and much cheaper as well. things have changed..