System76 Serval Professional Notebook

Linux Compatibility:

Ubuntu 8.10 came loaded on the System76 Serval Professional and it worked out of the box, but that is to no surprise. The System76 spin of Ubuntu 8.10 closely follows the standard Ubuntu ISO but with the addition of GnuCash, the build-essential packages, Adobe's proprietary Flash plug-in, a System76 driver package, OpenJDK 6, 32-bit libraries (for their 64-bit systems), and the IcedTea 6 Java plug-in for the web browser. Additionally, there is also NVIDIA's binary display driver. The System76 driver package adds support for restore, camera, fingerprint reader, surround sound, and brightness keys, until the support can be found in the mainline Ubuntu packages. The Serval Professional was formatted so that there is a 15GB root partition, a SWAP partition the same size as the system memory, and the remaining space was allocated to the /home partition.

Should System76 customers ever lose the contents of their hard drive, swap out hard drives, or otherwise need to reinstall Ubuntu, System76 does not spin their ISO but they recommend customers install Ubuntu 8.10 followed by adding in the System76 package repository.

Our testing had confirmed everything had in fact worked with the System76 Serval Professional on Ubuntu 8.10 -- the audio, the NVIDIA graphics with its proprietary driver, the card reader, WiFi, HDMI / DVI hot-plugging, etc.

Linux Performance:

We did not let the System76 Serval Professional escape our labs without running a few benchmarks first. Beyond using it to deliver our Intel X25-E Extreme SSD benchmarks on Linux, we ran a set of tests comparing our System76 Serval Professional model to a Lenovo ThinkPad T61. Of course, we used the Phoronix Test Suite to facilitate this benchmarking. The Phoronix Test Suite is our GPLv3 testing software that consists of 90 test profiles, a GTK user-interface, is compatible on Linux / *BSD / OpenSolaris / Mac OS X operating systems, and also holds a number of other features.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T61 was equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 (clocked at 2.50GHz), Intel PM965 + ICH8M Chipset, 2GB of DDR2 system memory, a 120GB FUJITSU MHY2120BH HDD, a 1680 x 1050 display, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M 512MB graphics processor. It too was running Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64. To recap the System76 Serval Professional specs, it was using an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 at 2.50GHz, Intel 4-Series Chipset + ICH9M, 4GB of system memory, a 32GB SSDSA2SH032G1GN INTEL SSD, and a GeForce 9800M GTS 512MB GPU powering a 1680 x 1050 display.

The tests we ran included Nexuiz, OpenArena, World of Padman, timed PHP compilation, timed Apache compilation, Gzip compression, LAME MP3 encoding, OpenSSL encryption, and Sunflow Rendering System.