My latest toy: Panasonic R5

I was already assuming that I'd be spending some money in Akihabara (Tokyo, Japan) before I actually went there or knew for what it was going to be spent.

Browsing through the hundreds (literally!) of local electronics stores, I once again realized how nice and small laptops (sub-notebooks ?) are available in Japan. One really wonders why those devices never make it to the European market.

Anyway, I bought myself a Panasonic R5, which is a 512MB RAM, 60GB 1.8" hard disk, Intel U1300 CPU, 10.4" 1024x768 device that weighs 999grams and is actually really cute ;) Wi-Fi is provided by an Intel 3915 a/b/g chip, and graphics is an Intel 945 PCIe - so no problem with free software drivers at all (remind me to re-implement that binary-only daemon for the new Intel chipset if nobody else does it until the end of the year).

Debian unstable installed fine (from a USB stick, before Windows booted the first time, so it's still a virgin), Xorg is running, everything seems fine. One thing that I didn't realize until after the purchase, though, is that Intel's mobile CPU's apparently don't have the x86_64 extensions (or EM64T how they call their AMD copy), which is sad. This is actually the first 32bit system I'm using for a quite long time :(

Jamal also got one at netconf, and seems equally excited about his new toy...