System76 Bonobo Professional

The System76 Bonobo Professional is quite a large notebook with its 17" display and this is certainly evident by its weight and size. The System76 Bonobo Professional is quite bulky and very heavy. This is certainly not the notebook to use if you are interested in traveling or carrying it around much, but only if you are after a high-end notebook. At the top of the 17" display is an integrated web camera.

The top of the notebook is silver as with some of the details on the size while the rest of it is black. In the top corner of the notebook is a System76 logo. Having quite a bit of room to spare considering the size of the display, the keyboard is very large and even has room for a keypad on the right hand side. All of the keys are adequately sized (about the side of a normal desktop keyboard) and there are also audio control keys, a monitor switching key, brightness controls, camera toggling, a touchpad lock, multimedia keys, and Bluetooth / WiFi toggling. Being that System76 ships their products with Ubuntu 9.04 and all of the necessary packages preloaded, all of these extra keys on the notebook will work "out of the box" on Linux. The Windows key on the keyboard is replaced with Canonical's Ubuntu logo.

Also found on the Bonobo Professional is a fingerprint reader, touchpad with scrolling capabilities, status indicators, and an integrated microphone. On the front edge of the notebook there is the lid lock, lid latch, and four audio ports -- S/PDIF, microphone, and two headphone outputs.

At the rear of the Bonobo Professional there are video outputs for DVI and HDMI, one USB 2.0 port, one eSATA, and the DC power connector.

On the left side of this System76 notebook is a Kensington lock slot along with a DVD burner. Ending out the notebook on the right side is a PC card slot, memory card reader, two USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire port, a telephone jack for a modem, Gigabit LAN, and a CATV jack (though there is no TV tuner included with the Bonobo Professional).