Samsung Q330, Fedora 13 & thoughts on Optimus

So my old computer finally gave in about a week before i was too go to Japan, so i had to get a new one for my daily needs. I have run it for about 3 weeks now, and i got to say, except for a few minor details, i'm quite happy with it. It sports a Intel i3 processor, 4gig of ram, 320 gig of hd space and should last 7 hours on a battery. I have yet to confirm the batterylife thou, but it seems optimistic.

But if it works with linux, is more important IMO. So I will just say, most things worked out of the box. So for anyone that wants a highend computer that runs linux pretty good out of the box, this is a good choice.

That beeing said, here are the things that does not work: The graphic card is a Nvidia Optimus card. This is the Nvidia variant of the new laptop craze of having two graphicscards, one for powersaving, and one for preformace. It sounds good, but right now it feels like everyone is all over the place, and nothing is really good supported. Nvidia themself sais they are not going to support this in linux atm, wich is kind of a drag since i had a minor hope that it would be supported exactly because it was NVIDIA technology and not some random vendor variant. Guess i have to rethink my nvidia loyalty.

The word on the street is that nouveau is working on drivers for this, but currently you can only turn of the powerhungry nvidia card. I havent been able to test this thou, since I need a .35 kernel for it, and i havent bothered since it will work well even with the nvidia card on. It does thou, reduce batterylife. But as we probably will see this technology in more and more laptops, i still have faith in that there will be a solution in the end.