Looking for (un)satisfied Leopard owners

[echo314]

I'm seriously looking at the Leopard desktop. Any proud owners of one, or not so satisfied customers?

Is this even the right place to ask? Seems like a support forum mainly, but I'm not sure where else I can get Sys76 info other then emailing their sales reps..

[tarps87]

Do you mean Leopard as in the mac os?

[echo314]

Nope (http://system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=27&products_id=94)

Sorry if that caused confusion, I just assumed the people trolling these forums would be acquainted with Sys76 hardware. The Leopard is a desktop put out by the System76 company.

[thomasaaron]

echo314,

You're in exactly the right place. Welcome to the System76 forums.

The Leopard is brand new. I'm not sure how many have shipped yet, but stay tuned. I'm sure some Leopard customers will start weighing in as we ship them.

[tarps87]

Nope (http://system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=27&products_id=94)

Sorry if that caused confusion, I just assumed the people trolling these forums would be acquainted with Sys76 hardware. The Leopard is a desktop put out by the System76 company.

Oh, then you are in the right place. I haven't looked at the desktops only the laptops which would be why I was confused. I do not own one so I can not be of any help.

[Gundahar]

I might be able to contribute to this thread fairly shortly. I ordered a Leopard which should move out of Manufacturing sometime next week :D

Unlike a notebook, it was a pretty big plunge, dollar wise. I'll let you guys know what I think!

[echo314]

Sweet, I can't wait for your review! What specs did you order? I am looking at the i7 920 proc, 6GB RAM, with the third video card offered (around 1GB video memory) for myself.

[Gundahar]

I ordered 6 gig RAM (a no-brainer imo), the 2.66ghz processor (a concession to fiscal reality), and the 1024 MB nVidia GeForce GTX 285. I didn't get a monitor or mouse or keyboard as I already have those things, although I probably should have gone with a bit a bling. But I also detest huge keyboards, and always prefer wired over bluetooth, so there you go. My main goal is to replace my current dual boot system with a core Ubuntu environment, then using Virtual box to shift to other OS's as needed--mainly for tech training, Rosetta stone (I still can't get that dang microphone to work without disabling pulseaudio), and games. Frankly, the gaming, and Itunes are the only things still keeping me clinging to Windows XP. But a sufficiently powerful computer should be able to work a 6 year old operating system if needed. Itunes will hurt--it is superior to the other music management programs that I have tried--but I can live without it. Wish me luck--I bet the farm on this move.

[samalex]

Hi All...

I've become so dependent on and accustomed to using my laptop that I don't even use a desktop at home anymore. With this being said I ran over to the Sys76 website to check out the Leopard and that thing is nice!

For now my desktop is still a 7-8 year old Powermac G4 dual 867 Mhz system with OSX 10.5 Leopard, but I don't anticipate on upgrading to anything else anytime soon mainly because I haven't even booted that thing up but a half a dozen times in the last year or more.

But please do post comments on this system when possible as I know of a few folks in our LUG who might be interested.

Later --

Sam

[thomasaaron]

Itunes will hurt--it is superior to the other music management programs that I have tried--but I can live without it.

I don't really care for it. It seems really bloated. Have you tried Amazon MP3 service? It allows you to purchase your music drm-free (so that you can use it on any player).

[Gundahar]

Good news, my Leopard has shipped :guitar:.

It should arrive early to mid-next week so I ought to be able to post some initial thoughts around that time.

As far as the Itunes thing--its simple, easy, and mostly fault free, which is why I've been using it. I have experimented with some other software to manage my ipod and iphone, but at this point in time, the closed source hardware/software ecosystem is beating up on the open source for portable devices. This will change, but for the first year - to two years of the lift of this Leopard, it will have to contend with Apple portable devices. How I manage that is the real question!

[ewg]

I totally agree with Thomas about mp3 players. I use the Amazon.com service for purchase and am completely pleased with players/organizers available for Linux.

[victorcostan]

The system is fast and looks very good. On the minus side, it's very loud, even when idle, and I can't figure out a way to make it quieter.

[thomasaaron]

The system is fast and looks very good. On the minus side, it's very loud, even when idle, and I can't figure out a way to make it quieter.

The Leopard!? What's your configuration. Our shop leopard is amazingly quiet.

[Gundahar]

Oh I don't buy from Itunes. Its more the ease of management. I was using Gpodder for a while--but after several months of perfectly fine use, it started failing to fetch my podcasts unless I would manually go to each one and update it. That sort of nagging user experience thing is what needs to be ironed out with a lot of open source programs. Not knocking them, its just that to move into mainstream use is the goal here--and each bug killed is a step closer in that direction. As it is now I would not ask my wife to manage her video Ipod using Ubuntu based programs. Hopefully I can change that shortly, but honestly--its not the OS. Its the applications that keep people on the other OS's.

Rythmbox has been fairly decent, while Amarok just crashes constantly in my current Ubuntu environment. Which is annoying to me, as I like the layout in general.

I do certainly hope that the Leopard is quiet--that was one of the selling points. Less background noise means better sound quality for what I actually want to hear.

[drewbenn]

Just curious, since you didn't specifically mention it, but did you try Songbird (www.getsongbird.com) yet? I know two people who have said they much prefer using Songbird to iTunes with their iPods. Not that either of them were big fans of iTunes in the first place, though....

[korvus81]

I just ordered my Leopard, so I'll make sure to post a review when I get it.

That said, I can't help but to stick my head into the iTunes discussion. It is truly the worst software by a mainstream company I have ever used. I am forced to use it to backup or add music to my iPhone 3GS and I only FINALLY got it to sync music in the last week (note that I got the iPhone on 8/8). When my wife tried to install iTunes on her Vista desktop, it crashed, and when we did a hard reset her system would not boot. When we finally re-installed Vista and got iTunes working, she had problems because she previously synced with her laptop, when we got her phone replaced we found out that a "backup" doesn't back up applications(?!?), and when we both tried to sync with her copy of iTunes it gave us a whole new set of problems (it synced my copies of apps we both had to her phone so she had to use my iTunes account to update them, all her music disappeared from her phone, etc).

When I installed iTunes in a VirtualBox VM, I could back up my apps in a semi-reasonable amount of time (an hour or two), but I kept killing the sync process after ~20 hours or so because I wanted to be able to use my phone.

When I moved to my wife's laptop, it took hours and several tries to sync with no music. Then I found that whenever wireless went down it would mark all my songs as not being available and that persisted through restarts of the program. As far as I could tell, the only way to get them back was to manually get it to play each one (note I couldn't just let it play through the collection because it seems to skip unavailable songs by default).

Even when the program works, it's just really, really slow. And since it doesn't seem to want to let you see the files behind your music, I have a three-part recording from the radio where each part is listed with a different artist (and I still haven't found part 1 on my phone). By far, the worst part of the iPhone experience has been trying to use iTunes, and I'd go so far as to say that it is enough to ensure I'll never buy an iPhone again.

Sorry, I know that rant was out of place, but I am still shocked that Apple would release software that was so poor. And the comments here just gave me an excuse to rant about it!

[thomasaaron]

I recently got a G-1, and it works beautifully with Amazon MP3. Plus, no DRM!

Frankly, I like the phone a LOT better than the iPhone, and several more Android phones are on the way.

[Gundahar]

Wow, that's a horrid experience using Itunes.

My own hasn't been even remotely as bad, in fact it was alright. However the major problem has come up from the restrictions that it places on the user for no valid reason. For example--having to de-authorize a computer that had a hard drive crash is pretty well impossible, so there goes one possible computer, having to work with the annoying non-standard Apple music format, that sort of thing. All totally unecessary and clearly part of a closed source eco-system designed to keep you there by making it inconvenient to change.

But I think its safe to say that a typical user will have a very similar starting point to myself--they have been managing (though probably not downloading) their music and media on Itunes for years.

The thing about getting a Leopard (which UPS has already attempted to deliver to my house once today :P), is that some things will need to change, and the ease of transition is very important. I expect, indeed bought a leopard because I expect to be a fairly heavy Vbox user--however Itunes is NOT an application that I want to make the cut. The real question is what application do I use? I will try songbird out right away, but we'll see how it handles my heavy use of podcasts. Then there is a second, but very important issue, of how to manage the MP3 player itself. Actually players. We have 3 in the house (including an Iphone) and I need a bulletproof solution before I present it to the wife, lol.

[korvus81]

thomasaaron - If I wasn't settled into a family plan on AT&T, I probably would've done a G1...but since AT&T has zero Android phones even announced, my options were limited. I do like the iPhone overall, but having to use iTunes really hampers the experience. I suspect by the next time I look for a phone, an Android option will be the clear choice.

Gundahar - I have to assume my experience has been unusually negative because some people do seem to like iTunes. I know what you are talking about with the de-authorization thing -- I had to use my once-yearly "deauthorize all" to get set up on my wife's laptop.

The biggest problem is that after iPhone firmware 3.0, nobody has reverse-engineered the format needed to modify the music library on the phone. So you may be stuck with iTunes there (as I am). I'm not a fan of intentionally making it hard to use other software with one's devices, but that's life in the Apple world. For non-iPhones, you might have some luck.

I don't really have a good suggestion for music management right now just because I lost most of my music in a HD crash a few years back, so for now I just drag whatever album I want to play into whatever player I'm using that week. I hear Songbird is very iTunes-like, so you might like it. I used to use XMMS/Beep (since I was a Winamp user from when it came out in 97 to when I went all-linux in 2004), but more recently I enjoyed using Amarok and, to a lesser extent, Banshee and Rhythmbox. The good news is that the linux world has a number of pretty solid music players, so I think you'll find something you can be happy with.

Here's a pretty good list if you want to try out a bunch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_audio_software

[Gundahar]

First impression-- (typed from the Leopard)

It is ungodly quiet. As in, you can't tell that its turned on quiet! This I really, really like. So far everything is in order--I have had to do nothing but run updates. There are a lot of updates though--about 30 minutes worth all in all.

I've got a lot of work to do to make this a more personally usable machine (mainly involving loading a ton of files from a backup USB HD, but also making the transition from Windows applications to Open Source applications). I am also going to see how much heat it builds up, but so far every component that I have fiddled with has worked perfectly right out of the box. Set up was minimal, simply consisting of plugging in my ethernet, Video, and various USB cables.

Response time is very, very snappy, as you might expect going from an older system to a newer one. There is no way for me to determine what the difference maker is. Better hardware, 64 bit OS, Ubuntu vs. Windows.....too many upgrades all at once. I just know that the various annoying pauses are gone, and expect that they will not return.

So far, so awesome!

Will keep everyone posted.

[thomasaaron]

I told you it was quiet! (or at least in told *somebody* on a thread *somewhere*.

It's downright freakish.

[Gundahar]

As an update, after a long while installing and downloading all manner of updates, I now have a fully patched Win XP in Virtual box, running at greater performance than the speed of my old machine.

Virtualbox with some apps is simply a necessity--in this case the first thing that I put on it was Rosetta Stone, which was nearly impossible to get to work natively on Ubuntu thanks to the lousy hardware recognition that RS built into their program. That's one multiple month long issue solved already, and the Leopard seems to have plenty of horses to spare.

No major heat issues, in fact it is cooler running than my last two machines. Still eerily quiet, lol.

Songbird failed to properly install, despite recognizing the OS as a 64 bit one. I tried by two methods (script install and command line), but this could be a no-go. Still, there are many options and Rythmnbox is certainly working for now.

Good times :-)

[echo314]

Thanks so much for letting me know how it went. Sounds like a pretty snappy system...

[jordansc]

No major heat issues, in fact it is cooler running than my last two machines. Still eerily quiet, lol.

I appreciate the feedback Gundahar. I know of at least one major manufacturer that initially had serious noise issues with their i7 machines.

I'd love to know your CPU & GPU temps at idle and under load, if possible. Thanks in advance.

[korvus81]

Gundahar,
That's exactly the kind of news I wanted to hear! I ordered from System76 instead of building it myself or ordering from a cheaper place mostly because they seem to use quality components (and also because they are a sweet Ubuntu-supporting company). I mean, it's easy to find something cheaper, but will it sound like a jet engine when I start it up? Will it perform way below what it should because of a cheap motherboard? Building it myself 'right' would take too much time for me these days, and wouldn't save THAT much money. The fact that this is a quiet, fast machine tells me that they did the job right.

I don't know if it will help, but there is a Ubuntu help page on installing Songbird. Not sure how updated it is. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Songbird

[DemonBob]

Keep the reviews coming. I am planning on purchasing one after Christmas. I last machine i built was 3 years ago, and here lately, i don't have the time to build them anymore. I do have a few questions.

Question 1: Does is support dual monitors?

Question 2: Can or do we have an option to order dual video cards?

[Gundahar]

Well, spent the last couple of days wrestling with software issues. None of these were related to the Leopard in any specific way, but are more of a transitioning from dual-boot to (hopefully) 100% Ubuntu as the OS.

First I got Songbird to work. It was necessary to delete libvisual-0.4-plugins to get it to fully install. Have not had time to fully explore this program because......

I have been tweaking my Virtualbox build rather heavily. I hope to have some games up and running on them (stay tuned) and will see just what the "gaming improvements" that Sun was talking about in 3.0 are really capable of. I plan to test: Rome: Total War; Company of Heroes; Galactic Civilizations 2, and possibly even WoW. It is worth noting that some amount of googling and tweaking is necessary to get Virtualbox up and running well at all, however once set up, it is amazingly convenient for running things that require a Windows environment. Rosetta Stone works perfect, like I stated earlier (guten tag, wie gehts). I am on level 1, lesson 1 :-( Some things that I learned were : how to set up the 3D video on the guest machine, how some programs need to have the mouse captured, and just how critical the guest additions are. I even had to deal with a blue screen on the Virtual machine (intelppm.sys driver error). So real that its uncanny.

Itunes fought like a banshee however. This had nothing to do with the hardware OR virtualware, but it bitterly complained about authorization and even removed songs from my Iphone. Awesome. It just worked. Against me.

At this point I am highly confident of the utility of Virtualbox. I will be tweaking several OS's in the near future, but this is not necessarily important. What is important is that Virtualbox is another important tool that allowed me to make a (almost) painless switch over to Linux. In this case that meant making applications that I already depend on functional on the box that I want to run.

Still working on: Some method of managing an Iphone through Ubuntu (I suspect that this will be a non-starter--the real solution will be wait for a better Android phone); gaming--always a weak area of Linux, and well.....just about everything else works great!

For the specific questions:

Two monitors are supported by the video card that I purchased. I don't see why you couldn't get two video cards, but you should ask thomasaaron about that.

I had a harder time stressing the CPU than I imagined, although I was able to eat 4 gigs of RAM already (and I have yet to set up a virtual network--may need more RAM, lol). I forgot to check temps though :-( Non-scientific impression was that it remained very cool, particularly compared to the DELL 745 and 620's that I have laying around.

To sum up, I have zero problems with this machine so far, it is providing the sheer horsepower to get done the tasks that I want to do, and also gives me an edge up in getting my transition accomplished (i.e. drop dual boot). At this point I am 100% satisfied with this sucker, and would get another over going with Newegg or Tigerdirect or building my own. (The parts do in fact seem to good quality--so far :-)

The only issues that I have are what arises from running Linux in the first place, and the machine itself goes a long way to helping overcome these. Put me down as a very happy customer.

[korvus81]

I should get my Leopard tomorrow, so once it's set up I'll give my review. I think it's neat that I ordered Monday, 9/21, they quoted me a 10 business day build time, and it shipped Wednesday 9/30! Looks like I'll receive it 9 business days after my order, and that's with ground shipping. Very cool.

[korvus81]

I haven't had nearly the time I've wanted to play around with the new machine, but I'll give a quick review.

I think next time I get a new machine, I'll make sure to get it with a different OS version than what I was using. It was a little anti-climactic to see basically the same screens on my new computer as on my 7-year-old one. It's a silly thing, but I feel like I didn't get the full experience of a "new" machine that way. Obviously no complaints with System76 here -- maybe I'll just have to change my desktop theme so that it feels newer. :)

The system is fast. Really fast. I haven't had a chance to run anything too complex, but my best test has been running Windows XP in a VirtualBox VM. Inside the VM, IE and Firefox both open in maybe 2 seconds -- faster than any native computer I've used. In fact, XP boots up in the VM in maybe 20-30 seconds -- enough time that I'm willing to watch it boot instead of going off and doing something else. I have yet to run enough things at the same time to notice any slowdown, which is shocking since I am really bad at closing programs (100+ Firefox tabs at a time is not an uncommon setup for me, along with GIMP, Acrobat Reader, Netbeans, etc). Oh, and unlike my old machine, this one can sync my iPhone with iTunes in my VM without flipping out.

I can't say for sure how quiet the hardware is, but it's quiet enough that I didn't notice anything turning it on next to my old machine. Once I get everything else turned off in the room I'll be able to do a better test, but for people who aren't too picky, it's basically silent.

The build quality appears to be excellent. A high-quality case, some extreme heat-sinking inside (which is probably why it is so quiet!), and plenty of open expansion slots. I dig how the power button and front I/O (2xUSB, Firewire, Mic, Line out) is all on the top edge -- very convenient for those of us who keep our towers on the floor.

The only negative thing I could say, and this is my fault for being too lazy to ask, is that the GTX 275 has one DVI port and one VGA port -- I would've preferred dual-DVI. But, like I said, I'm sure if I'd asked I would've received that answer...and it doesn't matter now anyway as my current second display is VGA. FYI, the dual monitor setup took seconds -- no messing around in my xorg.conf or anything.

Anyway, it's an excellent machine and I'm glad I got it from System76. Too many times I've seen people buy what looks (on paper) like a really excellent HP/Dell/etc system, and when I actually see it perform it really seems to struggle. My only guess is that it's a result of cutting costs anywhere possible. S76 seems to use quality hardware, and the machine performs accordingly. I'm very pleased.