Two New 15" Laptops with Sandy Bridge Architecture!

[whilo]

Btw,runs circles around nouveau driven nvidia hardware;
maybe nouveau is obsolete in the future..

Nouveau is the most promising hardware effort in the FOSS area imo. There are many reasons for it to be successful, most notably the awesome hardware functionality being accessible in an open way with things like Gallium3d and LLVM, which would put GNU/Linux out of competition compared to the blob-only support of MS and Apple.
It is also the only way to use the most powerful piece of millions pcs out there which are likely to stay around at least for decade (since their functionality is very broad already and their power usage does not render them too expensive soon). The PS3 is also a possibile target of Nouveau in the future and a very interesting piece of hardware esp. when FOSS gaming arrives (which is already promising atm.). I guess that the vendors, esp. NVidia when exploring the embedded area with ARM, will jump on the bandwaggon of open drivers rather sooner than later, since important pieces for KMS are located in the GPL'd kernel now anyway. They might still ship a propr. Gallium3d blob, but this would already be a progress and a next step to open drivers.

That having said, I want to be able to combine both the IGP and a Nouveau driver (which could likely share workload and even do really smart powermanagement then) in my future GNU/Linux system on the box. It would be really odd if I wasn't be able to use the IGP. Maybe System76 could confirm if the IGP is disabled in hardware?

BTW. WTF, why do I have to allow yahooapis.com javascript to be able to post? I have already lost a posting due to this

[whilo]

I got some relevant information from System76 on mail and am allowed to leak that here:

We're looking at using the Sandy Bridge IGP, however, support for it in Ubuntu is currently in it's very early infancy. It's something that we hope to offer as soon as it becomes a viable option, but it probably won't be until Ubuntu 11.04 is released, and I don't have any sort of time frame for when it will be available.

I don't think the hardware prevents use of the IGP, however, the BIOS isn't set up for switchable graphics, and changing that would require patching the BIOS. There's still a lot or work on the software side of things before switchable graphics in Ubuntu is a strong possibility, and it would probably require a fundamental reworking of the X Server code. However, if it becomes a viable option, I'm sure we'll take advantage of it.

Since shipping alone from US to Canada and then to Germany would cost at least 300€, not to talk about possible warranty issues, I am now stuck to get a machine from some proprietary brand :-/ Or have I missed companies shipping to the EU? (I know ZaReason already, but they are not really attractive to me)

[MarkID]

Nu?

We sure will. We'll have a 17" at the end of January or beginning of February. It's in R&D now.

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[isantop]

The Intel Recall through that estimate off a bit. We're now looking at the end of March, or early April.

[linuxuser12345]

When will you have a 17" model out again?

[isantop]

We're still working on the 17 inch model. We missed our original deadline, but it shouldn't be long.