I have been planning to buy a new laptop for a year or so. When I first started looking System76 had their 13.3" Lemurs but I didn't really have the spare cash to buy one. After having an eBay bonfire of my spare computing junk and a decent little tax rebate I decided that it was to go for it. After much debate about Ultrabooks (the jury still seems to be about Linux support) against something like the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 (lovely, supported but rather pricey), I went to have a look at System76.com again to find that they now have a 14" Lemur and, like all their laptops it can be configured with a wide range of options.
I went for the i7 processor, 8Gb of RAM and the hybrid 500Gb SATA/4Gb SSD disk. Total cost including shipping but not UK VAT was just over £680. VAT, which I had to pay in cash to the UPS driver, was £130, so for just over £810, I have a very able PC that runs Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit out of the box.
The machines are made by Sager with configuration done in-house by System76. It looks not unlike the last generation of black Macbooks, bigger than my last couple of machines, but not as big as a 15.6" machine, and with a glossy finish. It has a chiclet keyboard with an Ubuntu key, which is a great touch. The keyboard is pleasingly clicky if a little bit noisy.
When I booted it I had a bit of confusion about the SSD disk - I assumed it was a separate disk device and that the OS could be installed on it for speediness. It's more like a large, smart cache where often used files get stored for faster execution, and it does make a noticeable difference. This is a common misconception about the disks (Seagate Momentum XL) though.
So impressions so far - it has a US keyboard obviously, which is a bit different to use. I'm not quite a touch typist and I need to see the keys as a visual cue. I tried switching to a UK keyboard layout but I couldn't find the '|' key, so switched back to US-English with Euro key, which is roughly mapped on the correct keyboard. I'll reassign Shift-4 ($) to '£' at some point.
The screen is very good and very bright. The brightness keys seem to be the only thing that the System76 drivers control but they do make a difference.
The touchpad is a little odd - it's actually toggled on the keyboard with Fn-1. This might be configurable and it did fail briefly at one point last night and required me to log out and log back in again to get it to work. I had a similar problem with the Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 11 that I've been using for the last few months although that happens a lot more, like every few minutes, so I'm not too worried as yet.
Sound needed a little bit of work to get everything working properly. I was playing with headphones last night and it took a bit of trial and error twiddling between the Sound control panel and alsamixer to get them working.
Battery life isn't brilliant, three hours at a push (there's an option for a 9-cell battery but I didn't bother as it won't be going too far from home usually).
All in all so far, a very good buy, certainly cheaper than the equivalent machine in the UK, even including taxes, not that I actually found one that I liked. The impression of running Ubuntu out of the box is very positive and confirms that it's now a viable alternative to Windows and OS X.
If you're looking for a decent hi-spec machine for desktop Ubuntu, I'd recommend them. The basic Lemur, which is an i3 with 4Gb and a 500Gb SATA, is $649, which, even allowing for £100 in taxes and delivery is still pretty good value. Now to persuade Sager to make one with a UK keyboard...
s/
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"more of a stain than a globule"
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