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Actually the Lenovo ThinkPads are famous for working well with Linux, but a great part of that compability is due to using Intel components. So what if you get one of the models with Ati chipset and Atheros WLAN?

WLAN

The version of madwifi in Ubuntu is too old to support the Atheros Chipset (AR5418 802.11abgn) and current svn is broken; you will see the networks, but you wont be able to connect.
To fix that you need will need r3402 or lesser and compile it yourself. (Just make && sudo make install)

Graphics Drivers

You can get 2D acceleration with both radeon and radeonhd drivers, but if you want to have 3D Acceleration, you will need fglrx, which is actually not that bad at all in the current version(8.3), you just have to enable

• Textured Video to accelerate Video playback
• Textured 2D to use the new 2D acceleration architecture

there is TexturedXRender too, but it is still quite buggy, so I would not recommend that.

to do so add the following lines to the Device Section of your xorg.conf:

Option    "TexturedVideo"
Option    "Textured2D"

this greatly improves 2D performance - the 3D performance was fixed several releases ago anyway

During the GTK Hackfest in Berlin there was some discussion about how the future of GTK may look like, which provoked some blog posts.

And since reposting ones comments is cool, to point them out, here is what I think;
generally there is a consensus that GTK3 should mainly happen due to breaking API/ ABI, by throwing old and deprecated stuff away and allowing cleaning up the code.

I think that if we start cleaning up the code, we have to touch most of it anyway - so we could also switch to another language.
I think being written in C is a major disadvantage of GTK - yes there are binding for any possible language, but that does not help you if you want to hack the core.
The problem is that although you get all the features of a modern programming language through GObject, the way of accessing them is still limited by the C Syntax.
Also some of the features had to be implemented quite hacky, because we are already to high in the stack and usually the compiler should do it for us, like type-checking which happens in GTK at runtime instead of compile time or the poor garbage collection which is only implemented as a reference counter.

Switching to a language like D would instantly move all of this into the compiler, while the code would be still callable from C ie. without even breaking API/ ABI.
Vala would be another alternative but that would require fixing GObject, since it only maps to it.

just after the release of the 3D specifications by AMD there were git commits in intervals of just a few minutes. This basically kept on. Up to now there are following features in git:

• basic Render support for all cards up to r400
• Textured Video support for all cards up to r500
• EXA support for all cards up to r500

yes that means it works on the integrated XPRESS chipsets too.
The feature I like most of these is textured video, since it makes things much easier; you do not have to worry on which head your output is, when you watch movies anymore - you can even put it in between of two monitor and still have the Xv acceleration. Another advantage is that videos are handled correctly now by compositing manager without requiring hacks.

Oh and its in my PPA for hardy!

I wanted to put this out before I dig in for my exams; YouAmp "actually useful" 0.3.0 featuring a library browser. Since I more or less rushed the code out, I will have to clean it up next, so do not expect a 0.4.0 soon.



the whole changelog

• browsable media library
• package icon
• replaygain with ogg improved
• bugfixes and code cleanup

Another feature is that you can easily install/ upgrade it using the package manager, since it is in chinook-extras now.

Install YouAmp

Coming with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy my Laptop(hp nx6325) will be free as in speech, as the OSS drivers for it made such a great progress that they can replace the closed ones.

The integrated Ati Xpress200m was running the OSS drivers on gutsy already, since the closed source fglrx prevented the hibernating and the backlit brightness to be set.
Although the OSS drivers are not as fast as the closed ones, they are enough for everyday use, but I badly miss proper EXA support.
Read more about the state of the Xpress200m here

The Broadcom wireless chipset was not usable with the bcm43xx driver in gutsy, since it lacked WPA support and had generally bad performance, but the b43 driver in hardy is much better; it supports WPA and has even decent performance. It drops more often to 1Mbit than the ndiswrapped windows driver though.
But the general usability - espaccially with network-manager 0.7 is much better now; updating the available networks is now only a matter of a few seconds.

I just found out, that the last YouAmp release was wrong linked; if you tried to download YouAmp 0.2.1 from my website you actually got YouAmp 0.2.0.
Only if you got it from the the garage page you actually got 0.2.1. This is fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

as a compensation there is a small update for both youamp and mutagen:

• YouAmp 0.2.2 does not index the Maps ogg on the N810
• Both Mutagen and YouAmp dont ship the Python sources in order to keep size down anymore

the (correct this time) download links are here

so here is a new YouAmp release which features a preferences dialogue, where you can configure the replaygain behaviour.



Changelog:

• Preferences dialogue added
• Replagain should work with Ogg too now
• media scanner does not choke on invalid files

the download link is as always on the project page