Samsung X20-XVM 1600-V

[Oliver Fromme]

Hi,

I'm currently considering to buy the following notebook:
Samsung X20-XVM 1600-V (Centrino, Pentium-M 730, 1 Gbyte
DDR2 RAM, 80 Gbyte HDD, 1400 x 1050 intel 915 graphics,
10/100 LAN, b/g WLAN, DVD+/-R/W/RAM, USB2, IEEE1394 and
all the standard stuff; no legacy ports (serial, parallel),
though.)  At 1199 Euros this seems to be very reasonably
priced.

Does anyone have any FreeBSD-related experience with that
notebook (or similar ones)?  I've looked at the infos at
http://gerda.univie.ac.at/freebsd-laptops/ and searched
the mailing lists but didn't find any information about
the Samsung X20 series.

I'll have the opportunity to (shortly) test the notebook
and boot a FreeBSD 5.4 DVD and a PCBSD CD-ROM.  However,
that might not be sufficient.  For example, some investi-
gations revealed that it might be necessary to use the
tool from http://people.tecnik93.com/~acpi_perf/ to enable
the native resolution of the display under X, but I have
no idea whether it will work.  Also, I won't have enough
time to fully test ACPI, suspend, audio, WLAN etc.

I'm aware that the built-in 56k/V.92 modem won't work,
neither the TV-out, but I don't need those.  Also, I don't
need 3D graphics acceleration.  If the graphics works at
1400 x 1050 in 2D VESA mode, that's enough for me.

I'd appreciate any advice on this machine.  Any comments
are welcome, either "works great, buy it!" or "there are
problems, don't buy it".  :-)

Best regards
   Oliver

PS:  _If_ I buy it, then I'll submit a detailed entry to
http://gerda.univie.ac.at/freebsd-laptops/  of course.

PPS:  I read the list, so there's no need to Cc me.

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

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