OSNews

The laptop is a 1.4 Ghz Intel Centrino with 512 MBs of RAM and an i8xx intel graphics card. It has a 40 GB drive, 3 USB-2 slots and one Firewire 400. The optical drive is a DVD/CD-RW combo drive and the screen is a 14.1" XGA screen. There is ethernet, a 56k modem and an optional WiFi card for internet connection. For more info on the internals of the model, check the file here.

Xandros Desktop 2.0 was installed by default. I won't get too much into details about Xandros, as we have reviewed it a dozen times already.

The laptop has a pretty good, bright screen (minus one dead pixel, visible when the background is dark). We have three more laptops here, and in order I would place the LinuxCertified laptop on the 3rd place, behind our SONY VAIO and the IBM Thinkpad, but better than my 12" Powerbook screen (which is not the same quality as the 15"/17" Powerbooks).

Performance is very good. In fact, I think that laptop has more sprightly response and speed than any of my other machines here. KDE's and Xandros' applications pretty much load instantly. 3D support is also preconfigured and display a flight simulator with no lag at all.

The feel and construction of the laptop is very solid overall. The keyboard's feel is also very good, I just wish the PgUp key was not just next to the BACKSPACE key, because I've been hitting it by mistake all the time instead of the Backspace and that was annoying. It seems like every laptop has to have its own unique annoying keyboard layout quirks.

I don't have Firewire devices to test (except an iSight camera), but I tried out my USB Palm device and it worked out well with any of the usb slots. Ethernet also worked very well and with no problems. I burned an ISO image with the DVD/CD-RW combo drive, which also worked fine. On board speakers did the job as expected as well.

Being a Centrino, battery life is pretty good. On my test, it managed about 4.5 hours on one go before it started needing recharging (even without being able to dim the screen).

Overall, I don't feel that there's anything missing from this laptop. Everything that most people would want from a modern laptop is there.

The bad

There are a few major problems with the total solution: the integration between the hardware and the OS. These problems in detail are:

While this product is Linux-certified, the "sleep" function simply doesn't work. I find this to be the biggest shortcoming, as all my laptops are never "turned off." I just put them to sleep. It is so convinient that I can't even begin to think of waiting for a full boot-up or leaving my laptop on for its battery to drain. The LinuxCertified guys tell me that Fedora 2 and other distros with kernel 2.6 --when configured properly and maybe with some extra patches-- will be able to use the "sleep" function on these laptops, but for now, no joy.

The other problem is the various Xandros WiFi bugs. Half the time the WiFi card won't initialize, half it will (depending if you did a warm reboot or not), while only one out of the three networking-related panels of Xandros could see the eth0 (that's the WiFi). The whole Wifi experience is just not robust, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and the pref panels don't do their job well regarding WiFi. However, when the WiFi was in fact operational, reception was great.

When I visited the KDE control center and clicked the "monitor" preference panel, Xandros greeted me with an alert box telling me that it won't allow me to do anything with that panel because "the XF86Config file was altered manually without the use of this tool" and so the panel locks you out. (I had problems with that panel on my Linare PC a month ago as well). I emailed LC about it, and they told me that they had to edit XF86Config manually indeed, otherwise the Xandros detection tool wouldn't recognize the screen. On an LCD there won't be many times you will need to edit your X11 settings, but there are cases that you might need to (including changing bit depth for speed/compatibility).

On the front of the laptop, there are four "quick launch internet buttons" for email, browsing etc, but pressing them does nothing at all. Apparently there is no driver for them or a remapping tool available on Xandros.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a well-working, robust laptop, hardware-wise. My problems were all OS-related. The version of Xandros that LinuxCertified is using is simply is not built/debugged/intended for this laptop. Considering that the pre-configuration is this laptop's main selling point, we would expect better. This laptop suffers from the same minor quirks that affect the average Linux-on-a-laptop installation. It's a little better, because it seems that at least the major aspects of the system are guaranteed to run, but in this case there is no real integration. It feels more like Xandros wanted a laptop product and so they asked Linux Certified to create a laptop product using Xandros Desktop 2. It's just not that easy.

I would still recommend the LC2210, but I would recommend trying another distro instead. I think Linux Certified will ship it with alternative distros anyway. I do expect them to get a bit more selective on the distro they decide to sell their laptops with though. Integration is important on laptops, as it is not as easy to change hardware in them to find "more compatible parts" as you can with normal PCs. Everything has to work out of the box.

If integration was better, this laptop would get a 9/10, losing only on the quality of the screen and the fact that there aren't many upgrade options.

Overall: 7/10