News Bits: Intel Santa Rosa Nears, Dell to Offer Linux Notebooks, 160GB Solid-State Disk

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Intel's Santa Rosa Centrino platform nears completion

The long-awaited successor to the current Napa platform, Santa Rosa, is being finalized for its projected May release date. TGDaily has been told by sources that the GM965 Crestline chipset will be DirectX 10 compatible. The GM965 chipset will still use shared memory, taking between 8MB - 64MB for the graphics card.

Read More (TGDaily)

Dell to Offer Linux on notebooks soon

A couple of weeks ago Dell launched the site DellIdeaStorm.com that allows users to submit ideas they think Dell should implement and offer to customers. It turns out that the number one submission was the request for Dell to offer PCs pre-loaded with Linux. Whether that reflects the true customer base of Dell is questionable, but all the same, the company has said in a published statement they're taking this suggestion to heart and will be working with Novell to offer Linux on Dell Precision and Latitude business notebooks in the future. There's no indication whether they would offer Linux or no OS on Inspiron and XPS consumer notebooks, but it's not out of the question.

Read More (Suggestion for Pre-Installed Linux on Dell Machines at DellIdeaStorm.com)

Adtron unveils 160GB Solid-State Disk

Adtron announced last week a 160GB 2.5&quot; Solid-State Disk (SSD), the largest on the market. It will unfortunately be priced well outside of consumer reach.

The company said it will be shipping 96GB and 160GB versions of its 2.5&quot; Flashpak drive for consumers. The drives will be able to maintain a sustained read/write performance &quot;in the 70MB/s range,&quot; which is significantly higher than what a typical consumer drive is capable of. Samsung's SSD for comparison has a read of 57MB/s and a write of 32MB/s.

Pricing is the downside of this drive. The 32GB Adtron Flashpak drive goes for about $10,000; the 56GB is $16,000. There are no figures for the 96GB and 160GB drives Adtron wants to ship, but considering the prices of the lesser-capacity drives, it will be well into the five-figure range. Commercial SSDs are likely to be considerably cheaper.

Read More (TGDaily)

Notebook ODMs expect higher shipments in 2007

Quanta Computer predicts it will ship about 25 million units in 2007, representing a 30% increase over the 19.8 million it shipped in 2006. The launch of Windows Vista has boosted notebook sales significantly. Compal Electronics is also expecting increases in its shipments, with totals expected to be around 20 million units in 2007. Compal's projected shipments represent a 25-30 percent increase over 2006.

Read More (DigiTimes)

Asus W5Fe with Vista SideShow review

RegHardware has acquired an engineering sample of the Asus W5Fe notebook featuring Windows Vista and SideShow. The W5Fe is the first laptop to make use of the technology, and features a 2.8-inch QVGA (320x240) screen integrated into the lid of the laptop. SideShow is run off of a 1GB memory bank featuring a cut-down operating system, which links to the main Vista OS. SideShow can be used to play music and games, and can also be used to check your calendar and email.

Read More (RegHardware)

Dell Vista Upgrade Express disks now shipping

It's been a frustrating wait and registration process for some of those that bought a Dell laptop and registered for the Vista Express Upgrade, but forum members now indicate that Dell has started to ship Vista Upgrade disks to those that registered. If you bought a Dell and registered for the Vista upgrade at www.dellvistaupgrade.com you should be getting your DVD soon!

Read More (NotebookReview.com Forum Discussion for Dell Vista Upgrade)

 

If the Santa Rosa has a projected release date of sometime in May, I wonder when we will start seeing it in notebooks.

 

Good question.

Congratulations to the Linux crowd; they got their voters out. However, if Dell comes thru with the Linux notebooks they will then need to vote with $$$ or kiss their credibility with Dell goodbye.

 

Now all we have to do is wait until Dell offer Linux on their consumer PCs (I can't afford a latitude) and I'll jump on their next 14"!

 

One major thing to me...you don't pay for a license of Windows you don't need. Buy one retail copy of your choice MS and keep it through all your notebooks.

Of course, Linux is a very good OS...but I just cannot justify migrating for my personal use.

Not only will Linux users do this, a lot of consumers who don't want the bloatware and have their own copies of MS Windows will go this route. The best for both worlds in my eyes.

 

I'm assuming you're the Joelist that was posting on the Dell IdeaStorm site? If so, you should know that Linux users will be meeting Dell with open arms if they decide to use a non-Microsoft tied distribution on their consumer notebooks.

+1

 

i can believe the article said it will allocate 8-64 of the system memory for graphics whats up with that? it should have at least 128 and I think the gma 950 supports up to 224, i hope this aint true.

 

I think the only reason that Dell is going partially Linux is because they failed at getting their hands on the OSX license from Jobbs.

You think they or any other company would put the consumer before profit?hmmmmmmmm interesting.....

 

They're going Linux, it seems, because they're listening to what people want.

And, I could imagine Dell sales going UP, not down, if they offered Linux Solutions. People can still pay for Windows on all their machines. And more people might be willing to buy from Dell rather than building their own PCs, if they can escape the Microsoft Tax.

 

What makes you think there wont be crapware on linux, I'm sure they'll get people to make crapware for linux too.

 

Yeah, but the beautiful thing about Linux is that extra software doesn't slow the computer down. And if you don't want something to run at startup, you simply remove it from the system's startup folder (or whatever that distro uses); no registry values or services or any of that stuff.

 

I guess Dell is going to come with OpenSUSE? So strange it was only few months ago Microsoft and Novell joined their hand.
I do like hardware support that comes with OpenSUSE, Suse 10.1 was the distro that supported my 10 years old dual P3 servers with Symbios and NetRaid cards, but I don't really like their update system at all (yast).
Overall I think its a good news for people with Linux. I hope this will generate better drivers for their systems.

 

I just hope there's a good video card integrated into that bad boy.

It's painful enough that I have to wait until at least may to not get 2-year-old laptop technology, I'd hate to wait a few more months for ati/nvidia to put something worthwhile in there

 

Aye, the good news is that they can't leave anything hidden on a Linux install. Though even if they went with SLED10 or OpenSUSE up first, I'd still format the harddrive. It doesn't REALLY matter what distro they put on it, as any drivers they develop should be easily taken up by other distros. However, if they try and pull any proprietary crap, the Linux community will drop them like a rock.

 

Linux on Dell ???? Didnt MS have some sort of agreement with dell to not carry other OS's ??? MS cannot possible be happy with this decision ??

Oh, and SLED 10 runs out of the box on precision M90. It even automatically went and downlodaded the propriatary NVIDIA drivers. 3D desktop working out of the box.

 

I like the idea of Dell offering Linux in their notebooks. Gives you a chance to reuse your retail copy of Windows like Greg mentioned above.

And man are those SSD prices high. I guess it will be some time before they're in a price range that I would consider.

 

Laptop Logic is reporting that Santa Rosa is being released May 9th. Stay tuned for updates.

 

I'd rather just have no OS so I can use the one I already got. Linux is not my idea of a good time, considering you need to install everything that Windows already has, half the time it doesn't work, and games suck. Windows Vista is ok but has its own issues. XP is the way to go right now, plain and simple, unless you're a fanboy that likes niches I guess, then go for what suits you. I just want a plain good old OS that runs everything, and XP does that. Although I'll probably be forced to get Vista anyway for DX10 games...

 

with dell adopting linux, linux will be spread through the masses. do you think people will try to make some viruses for linux?

 

That's just a matter of opinion. A no OS option is great and all, but for those that like Linux (who are not fanboys btw, just prefer a stable, open system), the benefit of a large manufacturer such as Dell supporting Linux means increased awareness and more pressure on hardware manufacturers for Linux support. And personally I find Ubuntu easier to set up and use than Windows any day of the week. I've still got about 8 "yellow question marks" on my fresh XP install, and no unrecognized hardware in Ubuntu at this point. Consider the fact that Ubuntu took 20 minutes to install versus 40 for XP... I'll stick with my "niche" OS. $.02

 

Of course. I'm sure there are viruses for Linux out there right now; let's not forget that a large amount of computer servers and a databases run Linux. Linux benefits from a "security by obscurity" kind of thing, but it will still be harder to get large amounts of viruses for Linux as you have for Windows due to the inherent security features of a UNIX-based system. Add to this the Open nature of the Linux kernel that allows honest people to find holes in the system and patch them, and you would probably see many viruses eliminated rather quickly, similar to OS X.

 

It took 2 days of full out effort for my friend to install XP on an older thinkpad.
It took me 45 min to install Ubuntu (and I've never used ubuntu before).
And when I was done installing ubuntu, I already had pretty much all the software I needed (unlike XP), java 5, emacs, compilers, firefox, eclipse etc.
I dont play games tho