Gaming laptop

[fev]

In the market for a new laptop and I was thinking, what a great opportunity to load linux for more learning. Infact, I am going to be dead set on making this laptop Windows free.

What I mean by gaming is I want to be able to run world of warcraft smoothly. Thats it really. No big intentions of running other games atm.

I heard iBooks are pretty solid hardware, how well do they play with linux?

Do anyone have any suggestions or models?

[aliov]

It depends on the compatibility of each piece of hardware inside the iBook and the model !
in general for gaming you need a good VGA , for me the best models are the nvidia and they work well under Linux .

For gaming you can use wine ti emulate them , but not all of the will work , a professional solution of wine is Cedega , Cedega is good enough but it's not free . about your game it runs under wine .

The problem of almost all the notebook is the Wifi Card , the best wifi for Linux (at least for me ) are the intel ipw2200 and the ipw3945 .

you can also have a look on the Dell ubuntu Laptop models with the nvidia Card.

Regards.

[techieMoe]

In the market for a new laptop and I was thinking, what a great opportunity to load linux for more learning. Infact, I am going to be dead set on making this laptop Windows free.

What I mean by gaming is I want to be able to run world of warcraft smoothly. Thats it really. No big intentions of running other games atm.

If all you want to do is run World of Warcraft and you're leaning towards buying an Apple computer, why not just run World of Warcraft in the Mac OS? It's native.

I heard iBooks are pretty solid hardware, how well do they play with linux?

Do anyone have any suggestions or models?

I wouldn't recommend any of the iBook models for running games, even in Linux. The reason is that iBooks used a different processor than PCs (the IBM POWER, aka "PowerPC" chip). This is important because there may not be a PowerPC version of the middleware you need to run World of Warcraft.

To run WoW on Linux you need either WINE or Cedega, and I'm not positive any PowerPC version exists of the latter. There is a PPC version of WINE, but it's not the ideal program for what you want.

If you want to run on Apple hardware and just don't like Apple's OS, I would recommend one of the newer Intel Core Duo based laptops like the MacBook Pro. You could probably run WoW on a regular MacBook, but not very well since they only have onboard graphics chips. The MacBook Pro has a dedicated ATI graphics card.

That brings me to another issue: ATI has generally been much more difficult to get running in Linux than Nvidia. As far as I know there are no new Apple computers running with Nvidia cards.

In short, no, I don't believe any Apple laptop would suit your needs if you want to wipe it and run Linux for games. If, however, you wanted to use Apple's OS X, you could run WoW just fine.

[carlosponti]

my experience with laptops is that you have to use an external mouse and the keyboard is difficult to use for gaming. you end up just using the thing as a cpu with your own keyboard and mouse. secondly typically the screens refresh rates are not good enough for gaming. thirdly what kind of person would buy a new ibook just to install Linux. if it was an older ibook that you wanted to play with or the os was hosed i could see it but a perfectly new os? lastly OS X is based on unix so alot of the same concepts you might encounter will be the same as on linux.

[fev]

Maybe wanting to run WoW through linux on a laptop is wishing for too much =).

If it were to be possible though my best bet would be find a laptop with an NVIDIA card right?

[techieMoe]

If it were to be possible though my best bet would be find a laptop with an NVIDIA card right?

From my experience, yes. You're better off with an NVIDIA card if you want to run 3D in Linux. I haven't played with an ATI card in several years, however. They may have improved their Linux drivers since then.

[linx4life]

ATI has recently made a major commitment to the Linux/open source community. They are now actively developing Linux drivers "in house" on a consistent and ongoing basis, and are beginning to release some of their source code to Linux/open source developers. The fruit of these efforts has not really come yet, but I expect it will soon. Unless NVIDIA gets involved and follows ATI's lead, ATI will likely surpass NVIDIA on the Linux platform in the very near future.

This is the laptop I'm considering for my introduction to Linux, Asus F3SA-A1.

Here's a more in depth specification listing.