Will this laptop run Panda3D well?

General Discussion
1

So I do game development with Panda3D. Nothing really fancy, fairly small and simple environments with some actors, some fog and lighting, collision detection, simple transparency, texturing, no shaders or anything like that.

I saw this refurb thinkpad for a pretty good price:
studentcomputers.co.uk/refurbish … ad-t41.htm

and am wondering if it’s likely to do well for Panda3D development on linux/ubuntu. The spec is:

Processor Intel Mobile Pentium M at 1.6GHz
Memory 1GB
Graphics 32mb RADEON 7500

That Radeon is, I believe, not supported by ATI’s proprietary linux driver ‘fglrx’ which only supports more recent cards, but it does appear to be supported by an open source ATI driver module called ‘ati’ or ‘radeon’, and is supported with full hardware acceleration. See this page:

help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

Any opinions? Is this likely to run Panda3D okay?

2

if you intend to use anything with “3D” in its name in combination with linux you should buy something with nvidia graficchip.

ati has drivers,too(i think they still provide drivers but they arent updated anymore,same with nvidia.). older ones even have their own open source drivers… but… their performance is TERRIBLE. both proprietary and os-driver are more or less terrible. on windows this notebook should run panda fairly well (depending on the application you’r writing but it should be ok). but this ati chip under linux…well… near software-rendering performance^^ or at least not far away from it.

try to get something witih nvidia chip. their linux drivers are as good as their windows ones. even for very old cards like gforce256 (jeah those came befor gf2^^) and you can play tuxracer with them :smiley: