The final choice (compatible with the budget) was [...]]]> After working for years on a Elitebook 8530p, I was looking at a laptop which has to be performant, robust and with a good display since for my work I spend most of the time without external monitor and I need a lot of space on my desktop.

The final choice (compatible with the budget) was an HP EliteBook 8760W (model number LG670ET) with an Intel i5-2540M @ 2,60 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA II 7.2K hard disk, ATI FirePro 5950M (Radeon HD 6700M Series) with 1 GB DDR5 and a Full HD 1920×1080 17.3″ LCD display.

Unfortunately there is no way in Italy to order this machine *without* the Operating System, mine come with Win 7 Professional; I used Windows only for the time necessary to upgrade the HP BIOS to F.21, then I created a CloneZilla image of all the 4 primary partition (really bad partitioning choice HP!!!), and then erased all the disk to enjoy Ubuntu 11.10.

Installation went really really smooth! I’ve been impressed because all worked fine during the setup. The surprise come at the first reboot, since the screen was horizontally shifted by almost half (varying during a couple of reboot) as you can see in this screenshot, but in a few minutes after installing the proprietary ATI driver fglrx provied by Ubuntu “Proprietary Driver” installer, the graphic card started working like a charm. There must be something wrong in the Open Source Radeon driver, especially in the thermal control since with the ATI driver temperatures are really cool (under 45 in normal use).

I stringly suggest to install ASAP the latest ATI Catalyst Driver following the wonderful guide available at the Unofficial Wiki for the AMD Linux Driver.

I’m very satisfied with this laptop, FullHD screen is really a *lot* of space to work on and the overall performances are really really good!

From the Ubuntu point of view I’ve to report the following:

• Boot is really fast, in less than 30″ from power-on the lighdm login prompt appears
• Supend to Ram is working well and makes stop and resume still faster
• All the special keys (volume, display dimmer, wireless) are working fine, even the Calculator shortcut button: the only unrecognized button is the WWW but I find these buttons almost unuseful
• The Full Kyeboard with numeric pad is good, with good keys dimension and finger feel; I’ve to blame only for the size of the 4 arrows block which are a little small and my fingers still have to accustom the these keys
• Webcam is working out of the box even with Skype
• Audio is quite good and is working out of the box
• The Synaptics touchpad multi-touch is working out of the box for two-finger vertical and horizontal scrolling, cool! It is sufficient to enable it in the Mouse Preferences; this specific HP one has a locking feature that worked on Windows byt not yet on Ubuntu, still to investigate since there is an official package for Suse which seems to work fine.

I’d like to test the AMD EyeFinity multiple desktop, which is really a cool option by AMD!

The only missing thing at this point is an SSD Hard Disk which surely would boost the I/O performance, even though the TOSHIBA MK5061GSYN is doing a good job for now.

So if you are looking for a really performant portable workstation “Ubuntu ready” I’d suggest this model without any doubt! Yes, it is not a lightweight laptop (3,5 Kg excluding charger!) but I dare you to find a similar large display at a lower weight

If you want to save almost half a Kg, you can go with the 8560W (Model LG660ET) which has the exact same hardware but a 15.6″ display, but you must have a really good sight Instead if you have a bigger budget and want an Intel i7 with NVidia please take a look at this bug on Launchpad since some people are reporting troubles with NVdia based models.

As always YMMV

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Ubuntu 11.10 looks really promising!

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Kernel Log: BIOS bugs behind greater power use – The H Open Source: News and Features.

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npviewer.bin[6489]: segfault at 418 ip 00000000f6034d36 sp 00000000ffaaf868 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[f5dc7000+b5f000]

Well, Adobe some time ago released a beta quality 64-bit native [...]]]> If are using a 64-bit flavour of Linux, you’ll be surely affected by the npviewer.bin issue about random crashes of the Flash Player plugin in Firefox with a message like this in your /var/log/kern.log:

npviewer.bin[6489]: segfault at 418 ip 00000000f6034d36 sp 00000000ffaaf868 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[f5dc7000+b5f000]

Well, Adobe some time ago released a beta quality 64-bit native Flash Plugin player which seems to work quite well.

For example on a recent Ubuntu (mine is 10.04) these are the steps to use it:

1. remove the current plugin:

sudo dpkg --purge flashplugin-installer

2. download the 64-bit plugin from the Adobe site: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/square/

3. as root place the extracted file in: /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/

4. restart your firefox and verify from "about:plugins" that it get loaded correctly

You are done! No more npviewer.bin segfault

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In the prefs.js added these lines:

just to have a more compact date for the last week messages.

Then to have the date in my locale it_IT, you need something like this:

and the trick is done! The usage of [...]]]> To make Thnuderbird display the date in a more readable format, I made the following customizations:

In the prefs.js added these lines:

user_pref("mail.ui.display.dateformat.default", 2);
user_pref("mail.ui.display.dateformat.thisweek", 4);
user_pref("mail.ui.display.dateformat.today", 0);

just to have a more compact date for the last week messages.

Then to have the date in my locale it_IT, you need something like this:

export LC_TIME=it_IT.UTF-8

and the trick is done!
The usage of the script in $HOME/.mozilla-thunderbird/init.d/S00Locale.sh has been removed from T3.
Beware that you have to install the right locale and run “sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales”

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