[vox-tech] Fujitsu & Atheros?

[Till Stegers]

Bob Scofield wrote:
> Here are two easy questions:
> 
> 1)  Is it true that, all other things being equal, a Linux user would prefer 
> an Atheros wireless card because of better driver support?
> 
> 2)  Does anybody have an opinion on the desirability of having a Fujitsu 
> laptop?

I have a Fujitsu S7020 with an Intel 2915ABG chip. At the time (about 1
year ago), it was the lightest 14" laptop I could find for a reasonable
price. I am running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on it and usually WiFi works out of
the box.

However, the 2.6 kernels (at least those shipped by Ubuntu) started at
some point to include a version of the ipw2200 and ieee80211 drivers
which is outdated by now. But it's a module, so you can update to the
newer version, which usually gets WEP working again. I haven't tried WPA
yet, and of course you have the closed-firmware issue.

As for the machine in general, I am happy about the speed and the
battery life is okay for my purposes, but not great (maybe 2 hours under
Linux with one battery and no tweaking; about 4 with two). It does get
pretty hot and a bit noisy for my taste, but that is probably an issue
with most laptops under Linux (I feel the out-of-the-box power
management under Windows works better). What I do miss is suspend-to-RAM
-- only suspend-to-disk ("hibernate") works under Linux, and it takes
almost the same time as a complete shutdown (resp., startup).
Hot-swapping battery and DVD writer also doesn't work.

So far, the touchpad worked fine with the Synaptics driver, but stopped
doing so a few days ago (this might be a configuration issue). The
F-keys for volume and brightness work fine under Gnome.

As far as haptics and quality go, I think Fujitsu could learn from
Apple. I don't know the new ones, but the Powerbook G4 keyboard for
instance is much better -- it feels more sturdy & exact -- in my
opinion. And the speakers Apple used in the G4 PB have much better
sound, the Fujitsu ones are pretty bad. They also come with a build-in
microphone if you care (e.g. for VoIP) unlike the Fujitsu. On the other
hand my Fujitsu has this bay to swap DVD drive & extra battery, which is
very useful given the limited battery life.


Hope this helps

Till