New Toy!

The last week or so has been spent setting up my new toy: a replacement laptop for my macbook pro, a Dell M6400. The system came with only a 80GB hdd, so first thing I did was to swap it out and put in two 320gb hard drives. The boot drive I used a 320gb WD Scorpio Black, their top of the line 7.2k drive. The data drive was just a 5.4k rpm I picked up at a tech bazaar. My OS of choice is obviously Ubuntu, however being this is a pretty well specc'ed laptop, I thought that I'd install Vista 64 to get some gaming in (Trackmania Nations Forever ROCKS!).

Partitioning the boot drive was pretty straight forward:
- First partition would be /
- Second partition would be /home
- Third partition is the swap drive
- Fourth and final partition is for Vista

I'd given Vista a fair bit of space, in retrospect I should have provided it even less since I only boot into it to play *1* game. Everything went very smoothly, and surprisingly, even all the extra feature buttons of the M6400 worked out of the box in 9.04 - the only thing that I had to fudge with was the Nvidia drivers. Oddly enough the quadro drivers did not show up on the restricted drivers manager, so anyways, a quick install of Envy NG sorted that out.

Next of course was color management. Now Vista 64 out of the box had me very worried - photos and dvds were overexposed by one stop or more (!!!!) and it turns out that the nvidia vista control panel was set for very aggressive brightness, contrast and gamma. In any case, calibrating with an Eye one Display 2 quickly gave me back expected colors and saturation. I would like to mention that I actually got the 1440x900 screen. My MBP has a higher resolution of 1680x1050, however at many times I had to move very close to the screen to read smaller text. A lower resolution screen helps by providing larger text for an easier read, so I hope this isn't an error in my part down the road. It is also a "normal" CCFL display, not the newfangled RGB led stuff that's all over the market now. My take on this is that while I would love the extra color gamut, I only do photo processing for several hours a week, if at all. I'm not going to suffer through an over saturated desktop the rest of the time.

On Ubuntu, things went well using Argyll CMS, props to Mr Gill for releasing this for us on linux. Now Argyll at the high quality settings takes much longer than Eye One Match, however I think it performs better as on the lagom lcd test site,, on the contrast page I was able to make out all the individual colors. It performs well on the black point page (I can see all the black squares), and the white saturation page only 253 and 254 were not distinguisable.

The gamut of this crappy ccfl is probably very small, I'll see down the road if I want to plug in a rgb-led. (The M6400 is highly upgradable... cpu, four ddr3 ram slots, lcd etc. All you need to do is find the spare parts off ebay)

That said, I still think the old screen on my mbp has the edge, at least in viewing angles. Both are matte, but the MBP offers much better side to side viewing tolerance. Oh well. There has to be a reason macs are just so expensive eh?

So far, the last week I have been enjoying the improved productivity in linux, the main thing I miss from OSX would be the background wallpaper (!!) - I think that in OSX it's color managed. In 9.04 it doesn't seem to be. The wallpaper-tray widget provides the same wallpaper switching ala OSX, so I'm sorted there.

One awesome thing about this baby is that Houdini runs together with Compiz, so I can get snazzy desktop effects and run H at the same time. Woo!