Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I'm considering purchasing a used thinkpad, probably either an X31/32 or an X40/41, with the intention of carrying it around the world on an extended backpacking trip. The laptop will be running linux.

My biggest concern with respect to the X31/32 is the limited graphics hardware. I've read the laptop specs up and down, stared at the offical google earth minimum requirements, googled, and searched these forums.

As far as I can tell, it's possible to run google earth on the X31/32 under linux. Can anyone who has actually done so comment on whether it runs acceptably well? Do all the features work? Does it display properly w/o graphical glitches attributable to the limited hardware? Does the display keep up or does the system "chug"?

FWIW:
* I have no intention of lots of heavy 3-D work, but google earth is pretty much a requirement.
* I've read multiple, X31 vs X40/41 comparisons and know about the hard drive, weight, battery (extended/std), onboard graphics chipsets, max memory, etc. tradeoffs.
* I've been using linux for a long, long time, so I have no fear of any tinkering involved.

Thanks,

sz

I'd say go for the X31, for size reasons.

Trying google earth on my X31 (Ubuntu 7.10) it works pretty good. It's not stellar performance, but it's certainly usable. Currently my xorg.conf is in an "unoptimized" condition (lousy (but stable) ati driver vs. great (but somewhat unstable) radeon driver), if I got proper drivers going and a good configuration, it might end up being stellar.

The framerate is alright, it's a bit jittery, but not enough where you're going to get lost on the map due to bad FPS.

Welcome to the forum!

If these are your only choices (X3/X4) I'd go with X41, for the simple fact of 533Mhz FSB. If you don't need a lot of HDD storage space, that is.

Hi, and thanks for the welcome!

bobbarker: Thanks for the feedback! Glad to hear that google earth works for you, esp. as you're using my target distro.

ajkula66:

I'm not really trying to start an X3 vs X4 discussion here - I've already read numerous ones over in the X2/X3/X4 forum. I'm inclined towards and X3 primarily because:

* Somewhat cheaper (on average) via eBay than X4s
* Standard 2.5" laptop hard drives (storage space is good)
* Essentially as fast.
* Not noticeably heavier once you fit out the X4 with an extended battery to provide roughly equivalent battery life.

I really just need to know if the X3 video subsystem is up to my fairly basic needs. Google Earth will probably be as demanding graphics-wise as anything I run.

The main thing I wish it had is an internal DVD burner - but none of the X series come with that, and the few subnotebooks I've found with a DVD burner are out of my target price range.

It's all a juggle to outfit us with as much of the desired capabilities w/o condemning myself to carrying around 15+ lbs of electronic junk on my back for the next year.

sz

I don't know how much data you'd end up generating on a backpacking trip, but one thing you could do instead of DVDs (unless you're doing DVD videos which then ignore me ) would be big USB flash drives (they're reasonable at 8/16GB). Or if you get an X series they have a compact flash reader built in and those cards are getting cheaper by the day....and of course just a regular harddisk doesn't cost much either.

I will say to Ubuntu's (or linux in general's) credit, that hardware detection/utilization is flawless for the X31, if you somewhat ignore the video card.

I only wish flash storage could be enough.

Unfortunately, my photographer wife has promised me multi-multi-gigabytes of photos, and the only reasonable way I can see to safely archive this on what is intended to be a 1+ year trip is to burn them on DVDs (cheap, unsusceptible to magnetic fields, readily available) and mail multiple copies to friends/family.

We'll almost certainly have an external hard drive as well, but given how much space digital photos can take up these days, that's only going to suffice for temporary storage. I don't want to depend on internet cafe connections to upload 15 GB/week of pictures.

Good to know that the X31 is well-supported. That matches the impression I've gotten from googling, but nice to hear it first-hand. If video is a little tricky, then, well, I'll figure it out. I've been futzing with X and drivers for a long, long time. I'm still trying to forget all the hours I spend writing modelines for fixed-frequency monitors. (IBM 6091/19, anyone?) Wish I could help you with the dual-view problem you mention in another thread, but it's stupid of me to suggest config changes w/o an equivalent box in front of me. I vaguely recall Radeons of this vintage being quirky about the dual-view setup, but it's been at least 2-3 years since I had to set up dual-view with a Radeon 7XXX.

sz

Yeah for tons of photographs DVDs would be the best way to go. You can get a docking base for the X31, it adds an inch of thickness but you should have the chance for a DVD burner. I can't recall exactly if it was ever an option to get a DVD burner in the dock (CDRW/DVD) but there is a page on thinkwiki about adding your own standard slim drives to the docks:
http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_build_ ... aBay_drive
Although

UltraBay Enhanced (and possibly UltraBay Slim) formfactor uses a proprietary connector which is soldered to the board. No standard drive can be modified to be used in UltraBy Enhanced (Slim?) equiped Thinkpads.

The X3 base uses the UltraBay Slim, so it might be impossible...

It works great with the opensource radeon driver optimized.
For me Google Earth worked faster in ArchLinux than it works in my current WindowsXP.

And it's definitely fast enough. Enjoy your X31 !

Lenovo had their early spring sale going, and I ended up shelling out for a T61...

Once I figured in the cost of getting an X31 with ultrabase + finding a compatible DVD drive + probably having to get a new battery, hard drive, and memory upgrade....

buying the new T61 didn't sound all that bad. I still wish I could have got by with a smaller box, but I really am liking this new laptop! It's faster by far than my old desktop, which is kind of strange.

And with the intel X3100 graphics, I have plenty of video memory for google earth.

The driver does appear to be a bit quirky though, and google earth really doesn't seem to care for 'GL desktop' in Gnome.

Anyone else seen this?

sz

The X3100's still not "fully" supported by the intel driver, which I would say is lacking a couple features(Compiz blacklists the card). You can't really use Xv while 3d effects are enabled from a compositing Window Manager. Other than that, 3d works great!

sz wrote:Once I figured in the cost of getting an X31 with ultrabase + finding a compatible DVD drive + probably having to get a new battery, hard drive, and memory upgrade....

Yes, if you didn't have a great deal on a X31, I think you made the right move. The 2nd hand laptop market is not favorable these days, the sellers didn't understand that prices went down A LOT.

I understand that Google Earth for Linux was built by using the Windows version with a WINE wrapper. When I look at the menu bars, I can see that they look like unaltered WINE menus.
Anyone know if the Menus' font size and font can be tweaked in a wrapped application such as Google Earth?

sz, I like my T61 as well. I haven't played with Google Earth a lot. I wonder if it would run better under XFC?

Make WINE Apps Look Better. It's for ubuntu but as per norm I'm sure it'll work on other distros. Most of googles software is mostly just run on top of wine, or at least I know Picasa is...

Thanks. I'll give that a try.

Yeah, even though I'd much rather have scraped by with a cheap used laptop, our set of requirements ended up making the T61 the better bet. So far it's
panning out well. There are still a few glitches with the install - primarily graphical - and I definitely need to get HDAPS working before we go on the road, but otherwise it's great.

I do wish the multiburner drive wasn't one of the M a t s u s h i t a for which no region-free firmware exists. It'd be nice to have free availability of DVDs in SE Asia, but I expect we'll have plenty to do on our trip besides watch movies on a laptop screen. :-/

Since there are going to be lots of times where it'll be impractical to carry the laptop (5 day backwoods hikes, for example), I picked up a Nokia N800 for $200 and put 2 16GB SD cards in it. 8oz, Linux, several hours of battery life, and 32GB of storage. It'll be a useful companion for the Thinkpad and a great e-book/PDF reader and photo sorting aide, amount other things.

sz

That sounds like an awesome combination.
I'm actually considering getting a T61 soon. College engineering will demand something more than my X31 and it looks like a good option, unless they suddenly stuff a better LCD in the normal X61...

But... I've managed to run a few relatively intensive video games on the X31 under windows (albeit only at 640x480 with graphics quality on low). It's a shame linux handles the video card so much more poorly than linux. I could get up to 100FPS in some games but simple things like google earth just flop, in comparison.

So many of the google apps are still using parts of wine for to run. I suspect some of the slowness is due to that. And given that the docs recommend 32MB of video RAM, I expect that the code is optimized with that spec in mind, which probably results in a lot of *chug* on your X31. The integration in laptop designs is a double-edged sword. It makes possible small size and low power, but it also limits you to the capabilities of the weakest link. If you could just swap out the graphics on the X31 for a couple of generations newer chipset (and some extra video ram), you could keep using it indefinitely.

In a way, I'm surprised at how many new desktops keep selling, since I could easily get by for daily email/surfing/whatever with anything from the last 5 years or so. Since I hardly ever play games (and since my idea of a fun game is nethack :-/), my performance demands are pretty modest.

I would still have loved a smaller laptop for carrying, but so far the T61 is great. I've been using it as my primary computer since my wife and I are sharing the desktop display these days, and apart from missing my old logitech trackball, I've been quite happy. It's definitely a LOT faster than my old amd64 desktop, though the intel graphics can't compete with the Geforce 7600GS I've been used to.

Still, it's quite fast enough, and the laptop keyboard isn't bad at all, even though I'm spoiled by having used IBM model M's on the desktop for 15+years.

The N800 is a really nice, pocketable gadget. I hope to get enough time to start trying to port stuff, as there are several apps I'd like to have on it that aren't currently available. It's nowhere near as powerful as a desktop, but given the size and form factor, it's a winner. In my so far limited experience, most of the annoyances people report with it are due to user expectations and unfamiliarity with Linux. It's only sort-of a PDA. It's really more similar to a Sharp Zaurus in terms of capabilities and orientation. But the default interface is actually not that complicated. Getting the most out of the device does require spending some time reading forum posts and searching out webpages, but nothing more than anyone who is used to configuring linux on $(random_old_hardware) is used to. But portable ebook/pdfs/web access/email/music/video/internet calls/etc are all real, useable capabilities. And the wifi sensitivity is pretty amazing, so getting a connection is usually not a problem.

What kind of demands do you expect your engineering courses to place on the X31? I'm just curious what you believe will exceed it's capabilities...

sz

sz,

We're definitely getting to the point where the only reason someone wants to upgrade machines is because they want to. I suspect that because most machines built in the last several years will do what most people need, we'll see these ultra-low-cost pcs sell like gangbusters.

Also, since most of the needs are quite modest, folks can do just fine with Linux on these ULCPCs. Maybe having Windows on the main machine but on the second and third laptop, Linux would be just fine for them. If they need to do something on windows, they could remotely login to their home machine with their laptop or wait until they get home. - just a speculation.

bobbarker, can you upgrade the graphics on your laptop?

Sorry if my post was misleading. There's no practical way to upgrade the graphics in an X31. If you were crazy-mad with surface-mount soldering skills and graphics firmware jiggering, I speculate you might be able to upgrade the graphics RAM from 16 to 32MB, since there are certainly radeon 7500 cards/laptop solutions out there with that much RAM.

*I* wouldn't want to try it. There'd be a nice doorstop in the future if should I try such.

Other solutions are...non-ideal.

http://www.villagetronic.com/

The fact that general computer hardware needs have not grown significantly in the last few years is part of what I think is driving the popularity of the ultralight, low-cost laptop market, so yeah - I completely agree with you. I am still pretty content to surf a few years behind the curve and be $cheap.

Yeah, without some serious skills there'd be no chance of a better video card in the X31. I'm pretty okay with the X31 the way it is. I've got bigger and better machines for my heavy lifting The T61 is apparently going to get a refresh here in a few months (better proc, video card). I'd have to agree that general computing hasn't needed more power...which is nice, old cheap hardware still works

The N800 looks really nice, but I'm holding out for the Openmoko... but it's been a "oh it'll be out next month" for the past 6 months. I wonder how long my little Nokia 6230 will last.