Hardware review: TuxBox Computers SportCoat M750 Laptop

It’s been almost seven years since I stopped buying desktops for personal computing, and since then, I am always under the impression that buying a new laptop to run Linux on is a bigger challenge that it needs to be.

Over the years, I’ve spent countless hours on linux-laptop.net (and others) trying to get the most out of my hardware working under Linux. Things like proprietary drivers for video cards, network adapters and wireless, sound and modem support were virtually always making the life of the Linux geek a bit harder.

This month Linux Journal put out a laptop buying guide (subscription required) for the holiday season, a nice idea for the many people out there who may be thinking about buying a new laptop that can run Linux well.

SportCoat M750 photo from allaroundgeeks.com

About five months ago, I purchased a laptop from a fairly unknown place called allaroundgeeks.com . They have since re-branded their computers as TuxBox Computers, Inc. The laptop I purchased is called the SportCoat M750, which is an MSI laptop that can be purchased from several vendors.

Processor

At the TuxBox Computers online store, you are able to customize the type of CPU that comes on your SportCoat laptop. The base install comes with a 1.8 GHz Intel Core Duo (T7100), but can be upgraded up to 2.4 GHz (T7700), and all the other speeds in between.

RAM

The base laptop comes with 1 GB DDR2 667MHz RAM (1×1024MB), but can be upgraded to 2GB with either one or two sticks of memory.

The display

The SportCoat comes on a 15″ Anti-Glare WXGA LCD with a max resolution of 1280×800 and can be speced out with a Intel GMA X3100 or a NVIDIA GeForce 8400M-G video adapter. Both are supported under Linux, but for the NVIDIA adapter you will need to use proprietary drivers.

The keyboard and touchpad

The SportCoat also comes with a full keyboard, including the Num pad, which is something I hadn’t really seen before on a laptop before. The touchpad, which lets you scroll vertically by simply touching the right side of its surface area, works really well under Linux as well.

Networking devices and bluetooth

As of Fedora 7 (and 8), I have been able to get the PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller from Realtek and the Intel 3945ABG wireless adapter working out-of-the-box. It was as simple as installing Fedora and letting Network Manager recognize the networks available on my surroundings.

Unlike some laptops where you can turn off wireless and Bluetooth via the BIOS, the SportCoat allows the user to turn off the wireless and Bluetooth radios using extra buttons located on the upper right corner of the keyboards. When I first booted the laptop for the first time, it was turned off by default. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out and decipher the meaning of the drawings on the buttons.

I’ve also been able to connect mice and sync a cellphone on Fedora via the Bluetooth adapter.

Sound

With an Intel 82801G audio controller, the SportCoat has really good quality speakers and an external microphone. It also has input jacks for headphones, line-in, and microphone. It works really well on Fedora 8, and I constantly use it with VoIP software to make phone calls.

Expansion slots

The laptop comes with four USB ports (two in each side of the machine), one Firewire port, and an MMC/SD controller, which allows you to download your photos directly from your digital camera’s SD card (assuming you have one). It also has an express card slot.

Storage

Depending on your needs, you can customize your laptop’s hard drive with several choices from 60GB 5400RPM to 200GB 7400RPM. It also comes with a dual layer DVD-RW.

Webcam

This laptop does comes with an iSight-like camera. Unfortunately, that is the only piece of hardware that so far I haven’t been able to get working under Fedora. There are open source drivers for this Microdia webcam, but I haven’t gotten it working.

Suspend/Hibernate

As of Fedora 8, both Suspend to RAM, and Hibernate work out of the box. This certainly is one of the features that Linux geeks out there are always complaining about.

Conclusion

I use this laptop for my business and personal needs. For managing my digital photos, I use Google’s Picasa2 version 2.7 beta, whicha supports direct uploads to Picasa Web. I use Rhythmbox Music Player to manage my music and my iPod Classic, and when I have some time to kill, I do some “open source” racing with Vdrift and Maniadrive)

Overall, you should be able to customize this laptop to be as powerful as most modern laptops that are coming from the major brands we are all aware of, but at least with this SportCoat (MSI) laptop, I know that my favorite Linux distribution will take advantage of virtually all of its functionality.

This entry was posted by Anderson Silva on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 1:28 pm and is filed under review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.