Well, I have bought a new laptop now. One of these in fact...
Fujitsu Lifebook AH531 Laptop
http://www.ebuyer.com/285962-fujitsu-lifebook-a530-laptop-vfy-
a5300mrsa1gb
(though mine is an Ex-display model, so ignore the price...)
I'm pleased to report that it's a rather nice machine. Well packaged
with a very nice monitor and good keyboard. The touchpad lacks a
scroll facility, but otherwise it's very nice.
As you might expect, it comes with more software than you really
need, so I have spent most of the evening trimming the surplus
windows software and getting Linux (Debian Squeeze) installed
(which it now is). Two points of note on this;
Firstly I was pleasantly surprised to see a disk-partitioning wizard as
part of the windows setup, so reducing the windows system disk was
easy.
Secondly, I was less pleased to find out that the wired nic is by
realtek and required a non-free bit of firmware which wasn't on the
debian install cd. It is, however in the non-free repository, so you
need to do a bit of package work to find it, and some old-school
fiddling to install it. Once this was done, installation was reasonably
smooth.
I am yet to check out all the features under Linux, but I don't expect
too many problems. I will post benchmark results tomorrow for
anyone who's interested.
Cheers,
Tim B.
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