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Laptops That Support FreeBSD/Win/Linux/Solaris?
whirred asks: "I often hear about certain laptops being particularly bad or ideal for particular operating systems. I want to purchase a laptop with around 30 gigs of hard drive space, and when I do, I want to be able to use FreeBSD, Linux, Win32, and Solaris on Intel. I would also like to possibly install BeOS or OpenBSD. Not being an expert on any of these operating systems, is there a laptop out there that has hardware that is supported by all of these operating systems?"
Laptops are always nightmares. They contain a great deal of hardware, typically customized in proprietary, non-public ways, that can NOT be swapped out or changed. To make matters worse, Microsoft, being the evil money-grubbing bastards they are, now encourages (or is that requires) laptop manufacturers to distribute win98 (or whatever they are up to now) in a completely-wipe-and-rebuild-the-entire-system cd. So forget about installing windows after reformatting/partitioning the drive. Even if you have a different copy of windows, you'd still be missing all the customized drivers.
All that said, Linux on a laptop is incredibly, unbelievably useful. My recommendation is that you check out http://www.linux-laptop.net/. They are one of the best sources for getting Linux up and going on your laptop.
One or two other pieces of advice:
To get both win98 and Linux on my laptop, I needed to clean-wipe-and-reinstall win98, then BEFORE booting into win98 for the first time, resize the windows partition, and create the linux partitions. Win98 wanted to create a swapfile at the end of its partition, which prevented the partition from being resized. My friends in the windows world tell me there's an easier solution. I just needed to buy certain additional software programs. But, as seldom as I use windows, I was damned if they were going to get any more money out of me!
Installing Red Hat 6.2 locked up my laptop's keyboard whenever I hit the second stage install. (I tried every option from ftp to nfs to floppy to cdrom boot.) Solution: In BIOS, I set closing the case lid to suspend the computer, booted Red Hat off cdrom, closed the lid when it froze, reopened the lid, which unfroze Red Hat, and continued the install. Only problem: Forgot I had set this "feature". Later on, tried to ssh into the laptop after I had closed the lid....
If you want to spend the money, www.emperorlinux.com has a selection of pricey laptops with Linux preinstalled. They do offer custom partitioning so you could probably have them leave space for you to add other OSs.
Forget about the inexpensive laptops you see at Circuit City or similar stores. I don't know whether those won't run Linux, but emperorlinux.com doesn't offer anything under $2200-$2400 and those look a bit weak from a purely numbers perspective.
I just ordered an IBM X20 for work. I wanted the lightest one I could find. One thing that LinuxCare offers is their labs where they test systems for Linux compatibility. If they have to do anything special, such as compiling a new kernel or using a non-provided driver, they tell you exactly what they did and where they got it.
It definately helped me pick out my new Thinkpad.
I'm not sure what the exact model and make of the laptop was, but Neal Stephenson might be able to tell you. Try sending Neal an email.
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