Linux Laptop Recommendations for 2002?

ocasek asks: "I have been looking into buying a laptop again and one of the requirements I have is that it will be able to run Linux with all features turned on (i.e. suspend, APM, etc.). I used to own a Dell Inspiron 8000 that I had Mandrake 8.0 configured and running on, and aside from the wonderful BIOS hooks for PCMCIA that never worked completely, it was a good laptop. My question to the /. Community is, in your opinion, what is the best laptop out there to run Linux? I would be interested to hear what OS's you are running on what brand of laptop."

Comments

iBook

[nadie]

Debian Woody on an iBook 500. Everything works, once I compiled a kernel from Ben H.

Re:iBook

[Eagle7]

I use a base YDL install with most everything compiled myself, but I agree - the iBook 500 makes a sweet Linux box. I've got sound, ethernet, airport... I sort of have firewire, but I haven't invested the time to actually getting past seeing my external CD Burner (and actually burning something with it)

Re:iBook

[rorycl]

I use woody on a slightly older powermac (portable), and it works very very well. There are some important things to be aware of in the newer machines. They use softmodems, support for playing DVDs is, I believe, somewhat patchy, and support for firewire devices is not perfect. That said, installing the Debian distros are extremely easy, and you can expect updates every few days.

This is a good topic. Any Linux Friendly Laptops?

[Bob_Robertson]

There is http://www.linux-laptop.net/ as one source if info, but I'm curious too.

Everyone knows that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers colaborate on BIOS hooks and drivers, does anyone know if any laptop makers have made an effort to be so friendly to the Linux kernel and utilities?

I saw a wonderful laptop here in Tokyo a couple months ago, DVD, CD-RW, 1280x1024x32, 1Ghz Athalon, 20GB... but I realized that it's totally designed around Windows, and I'm not going to spend that kind of money on something I cannot utilize in its entirety.

Bob-

TiBook + Yellow Dog

[ubiquitin]

Wow is this bitch fast, I was totally blown away. Before installing YDL (LinuxPPC unfortunately hasn't been updated as recently or often as Yellow Dog) I was used to the double-buffer-double-slowness of OSX. With default, non-tweaked XFree86 config files, this thing absolutely flies, feels faster than the 1.2ghz Athlon workstation running linux I use at work.

Neat hardware stuff? USBview works as advertised, wireless networking took 30 minutes to setup, and firewire is the only main peripheral without robust support, something you're not going to find on any platform.

Price? TiBook is 400 mghz budget special (you can find them for $1600 these days)overclocked to 500mghz.

The main downside is that all of the RPMs out there are x86. Upside is that rpmfind.net has plenty of YellowDog rpms and Ximian's Red Carpet works great with it. If you want details on my setup, email editor@macgimp.org

Re:TiBook + Yellow Dog

[Otter]

I love my YDL TiBook too (posting from it right now) but the guy asking the question was concerned about having all the power management and whatnot working. I don't believe that stuff is supported yet, at least on new Books.

Re:TiBook + Yellow Dog

[Red_Winestain]

Agreed 100%. Plus, you are not limited in your OS choices. You can also try out

• OpenBSD
• MacOnLinux which lets you run Mac OS on top of Linux
• Darwin which lets you run the X server and related programs
• Windows if you have to via emulation (which is also very fast.

Plus, it is a seriously cool piece of hardware. For those on more of a budget, the iBook runs all of these also.

Re:TiBook + Yellow Dog

[x136]

$1600? Nope. more like $1299. :)

Check the online Apple Store's refurb section. ("Special deals" at the bottom of the left side.) Some really sweet deals in there.

Linux laptops

[laudre]

Emperor Linux sells a wide range of laptops preloaded with Linux; I don't have any direct experience with them, but it appears that they make a point of getting everything working under Linux.

They did get the camera in that Sony VAIO ultralite working, though, so they seem okay.

My advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Use what ever fucking laptop worked in 2001.

IBM T-series

[swillden]

I have an IBM T21 that I'm very happy with. Pretty much everything just works, and there are even tools to manage some of the Thinkpad-specific settings (tpctl). I've been running Debian Sid on it for over six months now and everything works, including the Lucent Winmodem, USB, PCMCIA, sound (using the cs46xx OSS driver in the kernel), IR, APM (suspend works great, but I haven't fiddled with hibernate), and XFree86 4.1 includes an okay driver for the Savage/IX video card. I don't know if Ultrabay hot swapping can work under Linux, although I have used the Ultrabay to put a second hard drive in at boot time.

I do have some video-related problems, though. One annoying, but not really limiting, problem is that the text mode display gets corrupted when X runs. That means I can't Alt-Shift-F[1-6] to virtual consoles after X starts up (well, I can, but I see blinking, flashing fruit salad). This has only caused me a problem once when X locked up and I wasn't on a network where I could SSH in from another box to restart it, so I had to hit the power button (which isn't too bad, since I use a journaled FS). When I shut down I see the same garbage. The others are that the DGA2 support has some issue that blanks the screen when VMWare from goes into full-screen mode, and also seems to cause some occasional lockups for the StarOffice 6.2beta (yes, it's somehow related to the video card), but you can define a certain environment variable to get rid of the StarOffice problem. Since I work for IBM I've talked to various people in the Thinkpad support organizations and they say they're working with S3 to get better Linux drivers made available, so soon I expect even my minor problems to go away.

It's also small, light, fast, runs relatively cool, has a big, bright 1400x1050 display and has the always-excellent IBM keyboard.

Re:IBM T-series

[xrayspx]

I have a very similar video problem with a Compaq Armada 7400 (PII 300Mhz). Didn't happen AS often in XF86 3.3.6, but almost 100% of the time in XFree 4 +. If I'm in X, and quit, the display borks. I know there's an answer to this, or at least, I knew it once, but I can't FRIGGIN remember it, and I'm too lazy to google... Simply an annoying glitch.

Re:IBM T-series

[John Harrison]

has the always-excellent IBM keyboard.

Hey Shawn, my keyboard sucks! The T series keyboard seems to be much less substantial than the 700 or 600 series keyboards were. My cusor keys have this stange behavior that I would proudly demonstrate to you one day. I have used a bunch of other T21s and they do not exhibit the problem mine has. Of course, I am often unlucky.

Regardless, I prefer my T to the 600, which was itself a very nice machine.

Now if I just had a T23......

ps I also work for IBM. Comments are mine, obviously not theirs.

Re:IBM T-series

[athp]

To solve your StarOffice problem, put export SAL_DO_NOT_USE_INVERT50="true" in your .bashrc (or equivalent file). This is also mentioned on the website of the author who writes the Savage driver for XFree86.

Re:IBM T-series

[swillden]

Yep, that's the environment variable I mentioned. The latest version of the Savage driver Tim Probo supplies on his web site supposedly fixes the problem in the driver, but StarOffice still locks up occasionally with that. The environment variable does the trick, though.

Re:IBM T-series

[swillden]

Update:

I said that I expected my video problems to go away soon, well, they have. Tim Roberts released an updated driver for the Savage/IX video card, available for download from his S3 Savage for XFree86 4.[12] page. With the new driver, text mode no longer gets trashed and DGA2 works fully.

Thanks Tim!

Re:IBM T-series

[Anonymous Coward]

Go for a thinkpad if you want to think long term,
get at T-23 and forget your worries for the next
two years atleast.

Re: powermanagement on tibooklinux

[ubiquitin]

Well, you can' sleep it from the command line (at least not that I know of) but if you close the lid, it sleeps just fine. Also, the battery monitor GNOME control panel widget works great. Another link to check out is tibook*nix at www.dachb0den.net

Major releases

[BenTheDewpendent]

Im sure there are a few out there. The problem is there havent been any major releases (that i recall) in 2002. There is a good chance many of the features will be supported but maybe not all. So buy your laptop hopefuly of high quality and reputable brand, Dell, Sony, toshiba, HP, etc... and wait, and check for drivers, updates every so often. The next Major release of your favorite dist. should cover things.

I have an A20p

[MaxQuordlepleen]

.. And it works pretty well. I inherited it from my boss (he bought an A30p). We're both running Red Hat 7.2. He constantly used to gripe about the A20 freezing up in X. After having it for a couple of days, I determined that SpeedStep was somehow causing the problem.

Without SpeedStep my battery life is about 30 minutes, but that's not a major issue for me. The A30p seems to be stable even with speedstep turned on.

Re:I have an A20p

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. Good to see that PC laptops still are getting 30 minutes of battery life at full speed, when Mac laptops are getting at least 4 at their highest setting. No such better assurance that I went with the right purchase!

portable unix?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why muck around with anything else? OSX gives you IE, office, and tcsh, all running at the same time.

You can be all political if you like, but the simple fact is that IE and office are the best applications in their class. So, while you think you're appealing to a higher power, I'm quitely getting work done without hassle.

Have it your way.

Re:portable unix?

[BigChigger]

thanks we will. And when Microsoft decides that it's no longer in their interest to support Mac (say, after the trial is over) then they will drop support for Mac and your machine will become a boat anchor.

Remember your post when that happens; and don't come crying to linux to save you. You don't deserve it.

BC

Re:portable unix?

[dthable]

You can be all political if you like, but the simple fact is that IE and office are the best applications in their class.

That's only true if:

You want to exchange files with another user that only has Office (or yourself for work).

You started learning MS Office as the first package.

I withheld the need to use GUI text editors for a long time. vi has everything I need and with tools like ispell, I was fine. My first GUI office suite was StarOffice. I've been using it without problem since 1998.

I tried using MS Office XP recently for work and found it was difficult and hard to use. Why? Because I know StarOffice and I keep thinking in terms of StarOffice. Since MS Office doesn't act the same, I don't like it.

Where am I going? There is no truth to the statement that MS Office is the best. It may be the best for you, but not for everyone. I'm personally waiting for OpenOffice to get the Mac OS X version ready so I can ditch MS Office.

Re:portable unix?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they might work fairly well however I prefer *free* software. :) StarOffice/Netscape.

-Jeremy

Re:portable unix?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean OpenOffice and Mozilla?

Neither StarOffice nor Netscape are free.

Re:portable unix?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, I really don't like Office or tcsh. Further, I refuse to use IE simply because along with Outlook, it's one of the greatest contributors of security flaws since sendmail. Any program which will automagically run the executable in any binhexed attachment you download was not designed with security in mind. It's hardly the only example of such behavior either.

To further bring my grievances to the table, ALL of the silly effects (not just the "genie" effect in the dock and the annoying bouncing effect) should have an option to disable them. I really don't feel like waiting for a transluscent modal dialog box to slide in, it simply makes the system feel sluggish. When I use a UNIX system, I have come to expect a responsive system. Anything less is simply not worth paying for. I've used it on the newest G4s at work, even with a better processor it still doesn't feel right. I'd rather use MacOS 7...

Another gripe is the lack of at least 2 mouse buttons. Even if you don't care about what 3 do in X or what 2 of them do on a PC, you have to admit that in most games it's pretty inconvenient to be stuck with only one. I have machines on both sides of the fence, and I curse Apple's name every time I have to hold the control key on my laptop to do a "right click" in a game. The same can be said for those who are used to context sensitive menus in applications. If it were a desktop machine I could add a mouse and I'd be set, but this is a bloody laptop and I can't change it without voiding the warranty. They should at least provide one extra button since you're paying the extra money for the Apple brand. WHY? (bangs head against powerbook)

Another problem I have with OS X, though it's not a laptop issue specifically - the terminals don't go away when you terminate the shell. They hang there expecting you to use the (1-button, grumble) rodent to close the window. If this is configurable I'd love to hear how to disable this. It's quite annoying when I'm using the terminal simply because I'd prefer not to use the mouse.

Other than these issues I suppose OS X is a reasonable alternative if you can't get Linux to run. I certainly wouldn't say that it's a better choice if what you are looking for is UNIX, though. For what I need, I will still have a PC laptop with Linux running on it from work for the forseeable future. VMware provides me with Office and IE if I ever have to deal with them again (and it will be too soon if I do.) I may purchase another Mac laptop for the Mac apps I still use (Adobe), but with all the annoyances I'm still not decided. I would really prefer to not use Windows, but there are certain areas where Apple still just doesn't seem to get it.

Re:portable unix?

[blakestah]

And when Microsoft decides that it's no longer in their interest to support Mac (say, after the trial is over) then they will drop support for Mac and your machine will become a boat anchor.

M$ won't wait that long. As part of Mac shipping IE as the default and not allowing Netscape on the first boot desktop, M$ supports Office and Outlook for Mac until August of this year. That is right - the guarantee of continued support that was discussed in the antitrust trial ends in 5 months.

Be interesting to see the response of M$. MAc is going to seriously start eating into their desktop advantage with OSx - better multimedia, and just as good (or better) for Office and IE.

Armada M700

[c.r.o.c.o]

I don't know very much about other laptops, but I can speak from experience. I have an Armada M700, P3 750Mhz w/192Mb RAM, Ati Rage Mobility P 8Mb, 12Gb hdd, Intel EtherExpress NIC, Maestro2 sound, etc. And it's running RedHat 7.2 flawlessly.

All I had to do was insert the install CD, and everything worked perfectly from then on. Autodetected my video, sound, network, APM, etc. No error messages, no troubles with anything. After the install, everything was still running perfectly. None of the problems that a previous poster has with the text mode after starting X. The sound works (does not break, etc). Power management works too, I just have to figure out how to set it up properly, so that it actually does what I want it to do.

Now I know that this is not a brand-new model (at least not with these specs), but you can get the latest one, with pretty much the same base components. They are flawlessly supported in RedHat, even from the very start.

On top of that, Compaq business support is great. I needed a new LCD for it, and they 24/7 phone support, free overnight shipping to and from ther service centres. And everybody I talked to was very polite, knowledgeable. But always deal directly with Compaq, I had some problems with their authorised service centres.

All in all, I strongly recommend the Armada M700 series.

Re:Armada M700

[Anonymous Coward]

Try a docking station, it won't be so flawless. ;-)

sony vaio pcg-fx-405

[IainB]

very sweet, only problems are the modem and sound card. (both software/windows based)

all the apm stuff seems to work fine as well.

came bundled with XP as standard, i've left it running and am dual booting with debian.

Ibook 600MHZ

[Noodlenose]

I would go for a Ibook running YDL. You not only have the streetcred and geekiness of Linux, but you also have the pulling power and theadoration that comes with an Apple Computer.

Dirk

IBM X-series

[SgtChaireBourne]

The X-series (X20 & X21) has worked great for the last year with RedHat. No problems that I could find or create except hibernate never worked and sometimes suspend left the CPU very (too) busy afterwards until reboot. But over all, I'd recommend the X-series if you don't want the larger screen that the T-series can have or if you want light weight. The docking station with DVD reader/CD-RW is great, but I get much more use out of the port replicator.

I had problems with the T-series choice of graphics and sound chips which needed drivers that were not on the RedHat CDs. This is in my view relatively minor, and not the reason I returned it -- if I had more free time this spring I would have kept it.

No X probs with my a20p

[phr2]

I haven't measured battery life. I don't know of a way to turn speedstep on and off under linux. When I ran windows, I set everything to the slowest speed to make the fan run less (the noise bugs me).

My out-of-date review is here.

Re:No X probs with my a20p

[MaxQuordlepleen]

You can turn SpeedStep features off in the BIOS,the OS doesn't matter much...

dell inspiron 8000

[Mandrake]

my dell inspiron laptops both work flawlessly, and I recommend them highly. especially since they can do 1600x1200 and have a 32mb gf2go card in them... I have never had any problems with pcmcia that you have had. *shrug*

Dell Inspiron 3800 && SuSE

[Corpset]

Works like a charm. No hassles with Linux on it. Just popped in teh first CD, booted from it and ten minutes later everything was installed and ready to go. The only problem with it is Dell. Dell are nasty if everything ever goes wrong with your laptop. So, eventhough it works, stay away.

Digital Networks United Kingdom

[fingal]

If you are not too fussed about the size (or weight) of your laptop, and are looking for a cheap(er) option, then you could do a lot worse than checking out Digital Networks United Kingdom. I'm currently using one of their Quadra 150 boxes which will ship with Red Hat or Mandrake pre-installed and configured (although I've since dropped SuSE onto mine).

The only thing that doesn't work is the internal winmodem (although they will sell you and pre-configure a pcmcia modem) and the TV out. The box is 1G PIII and can be supplied with up to 1G of memory and has a very pleaant 1400x1024 TFT screen. My workstation has been sitting in a cupboard for some time now...

Re:Digital Networks United Kingdom

[cowbutt]

If you don't care about the pre-installed Linux, then you could pickup a Clevo laptop sold by a number of Tier 3 vendors, including AJP, Evesham, Mesh, Rock, Sigma, IPC and many, many others. The Quadra 150 appears to be the same as the Clevo 8500V.

DNUK have a good rep. but they aren't the cheapest.

--

Re:Digital Networks United Kingdom

[fingal]

Too true. In fact, if I was to be totally honest, then I would admit that I was using the AJP version of the box, but given the choice again I would probably go for the DNUK version just for the knowledge of not having to track down the various drivers for things + the knowledge that I could phone them up and get a sensible answer that doesn't involve downloading a new windows driver...

Re:Digital Networks United Kingdom

[cowbutt]

Heh. Well, a little detective work seems to indicate that my Toshiba 3000-214 is actually a Compal ACL00 as sold by ChemBook and others.

For more info, check out DiscountLaptops and PowerNotebooks. It's a shame that laptops are much more expensive in the UK and that our Tier 3 vendors only seem to sell ASUS (in the case of Hi-Grade) and Clevo. Both of which are OK, but it'd be nice to have a few alternatives.

--

Re:Digital Networks United Kingdom

[billlion]

I have more or less the same model from DNUK,which I bought last year, with preinstalled RH7.1. Generally I recommend buying a laptop with Linux preinstalled from a specialist supplier if you dont have time to fiddle and just want to get on with your work. I never managed to get it to sync with my handspring visor over USB, but Lee from DNUK did very patiently talk me through the Kernel recompilation I needed for this.

HP Omnibook 500

[MrBlic]

I am really happy with my HP Omnibook 500. I have two hard drives, one with Win2k and one with Debian (sid) and it is really easy to swap the hard drives (I don't even keep them screwed in place.

The omnibook500 is 3.5 lbs and one inch thick. the 12.1 inch screen is perfect for me. The USB is great, and powers some high-current USB devices from the laptop battery for 2 hours. I get 3.5 hours normally.

Debian works like a charm, recognizing every feature that I have cared to try. Best of all, you can find them starting at $1000 for a 500MHz model, up to 2400 for a 750MHz model. I recently bought a second one for $1600 w/ 700MHz and a base with CDROM. This does make the debian install much easier. (Previously I had to take the hard drive out and with a special cable, put the tiny IDE drive in my tower computer to start the install, and then slap it in the omnibook at that point in the Debian install where you reboot and continue the installation)

The only drawback is it uses a Mobility M1 Rage from ATI which doesn't have any 3D X support. (It doesn't even do OpenGL very well in the first place) I still prefer it to the latest and greatest Geforce 2go and related laptops from Toshiba. The quality and style of the HP Omnibook 500 is just right for me.

-Jim

Old Gateway 9150 300MHz

[Goose3254]

Everything went in clean with Mandrake 8.1 with OGLE as a staight outta the box DVD player with menu support. The sound is a bit flakey, can't get the "case speakers" and sound card to co-operate but the lineout to headphones works fine. Took a trip to Limmodem land to get the modem working. The build found my USB ZipCD and my USB Zio smartmedia reader (still won't write thought). With the harddrive upgrade I threw in and maxing out the system memory I have $375 in with a max of 8 hours work.

Panasonic Toughbook CF-47

[Zurk]

Running Debian 2.2r3 on a CF-47 panasonic toughbook. Everything works fine in debian other than the Hauppage WinTV+FM video input. It has a lucent winmodem which is ok with the binary only driver, XFree works great (1024x768,24bpp, 14.1 inch LCD) on the Neomagic Magicmedia 256AV video chipset, The system uses standard PC-100 SDRAM and a TI PCMCIA chipset. I use a dongle-less xircom ethernet card which works great with the xirc2ps driver, the standard dvd hack for the RPC-1 regionless toshiba DVD drive for playing movies and full stereo sound is provided by alsa drivers (ymfpci) for the onboard YMF-744B sound chipset. My CDRW (Acer 4406EU) also works great with mkisofs/cdrecord. Hard drive is standard fujitsu and works nicely with DMA enabled. LS-120 floppy also works well.
In other words -- fully supported except for my add-on Hauppage Wintv+FM board which i use win2k for.
Make sure you get a WARRANTY though -- very few people repair toughbooks and they are fairly rare. The fantastically mindblowing construction (its incredible to see how well they're made when you open em up and see the titanium housing, gell mounted spring loaded hard drive and mobo enclosure etc etc) makes up for it.

Inspiron 8200

[bmarklein]

You may also want to check out the Inspiron 8200, just announced by Dell. Has the new P4-M at up to 1.7GHz, up to 1GB RAM, Enhanced UXGA, etc.

Toshiba Satellite 3000-214

[cowbutt]

I'm getting on pretty well with a Toshiba 3000-214. The bigger brother is the -514 with a PIIIm-1G instead of the PIIIm-933 in the -214. They're known as the 3000-S204 and similar in the US.

AFAIK, they've sold out of a lot of places now, but you might still find them (at clearance prices, natch!) in the shops. Almost everything works; the exceptions are the modem (AMR Lucent/Agere controllerless) and power management (only APM power off and DPMS seem to work).

Red Hat 7.2 needs to be setup in text mode and the nVidia driver added post-install to support the geforce 2go (even TV out works). The built-in ethernet is an RTL8139. USB works out of the box.

Infra-Red also works and I have it happily talking to a Nokia 6210.

One potential 'gotcha' is that there are no PS/2 or serial ports. Depending on your intended use, this may be something of a showstopper as serial PC-cards are quite expensive and USB serial adaptors aren't reputed to be terribly compatible with all serial devices.

--

any experience with qlitech?

[brlewis]

I've been thinking I'd like to get the qlitech king whenever I have the money. Pre-installed Debian sounds like a win. Anybody have experience buying through them?

SW Technology has Linux Laptops too.

[Arathar]

I was searching for Linux Laptops and ran across SW Technology. http://www.swt.com They have Asus Laptops which come, by default, with Linux on them. I have not purchased one, but they claim that they configure everything before sale. From http://www.swt.com/cgi-bin/query_spec?linux - "Our installation is not just a dump of all the packages from the distributions. In addition to more utilities, we configure the Linux kernel and modules to work with the system coherently; The X Window System is setup to get the most from the grahics card and monitor chosen -- flicker-free is guaranteed."

Apple iBook

[jchristopher]

Right now, you can buy a 500mhz Apple iBook for $999 brand new. It's nice hardware and the battery lasts forever, built in 802.11b, etc.

Now the bad news - the PPC distributions of Linux are not nearly as good as the x86 ones at making things "work". Plan on having to swap kernels and do a lot of tweaking to get everything working. If that's not your thing, stick to x86.

I could easily recommend this laptop once Yellow Dog or Mandrake gets their act together. It's my belief that a PPC-centric distro should at least have Airport and sound working after the install. To my knowledge, no current PPC distro will do that.

Mandrake 8.2 PPC final seems pretty close, maybe it will solve some of these problems.

Inspiron 8000

[LindaAthena]

Despite my annoyance in Dell's cutting Linux support off for their laptops, they still seem to have top of the line.

I'm running SuSE 7.3, vanilla kernel 2.2.17 -- later added on the premptible kernel patch.

My beef is my 3-year support contract will run out later this year. Taught me: always buy the 3 year on-site service contract. It is worth it. I had hinge problems so bad on my 7500 that they upgraded me to a 8000 for free since they were paying more to service the bad hinge design on the 7500 than I paid for it. The 'send-in' warrantee would have been worthless.

Only problems since then...um 1 disk replace (backups are good). And the "mode" keys (shift, ctl), seem to send stray mouse clicks/motions when held down). This happens in both Windows and Linux, so it may be a HW or BIOS problem.

Anyway -- right now, in their 2-3K price range their top of the line is little better than I have now, so it's a bum to think about upgrading.

Haven't found any laptops with memory >512M, nor multi CPU. Simply wanked up processors (which wouldn't even get me 2x and marginally larger HD's (40-50G I think is the range now, but I haven't checked their site in a while.

I think all their laptops are made in China and rebranded -- forget the company name though.

Linda

Re:Inspiron 8000

[philologist]

I concur on the Inspiron 8000. I am running Red Hat 7.1 and have been very happy with everything except for the teeth I had to pull to get Dell to support problems on the system. The system is the older type, with the ATI graphics chip---the newer ones have GeForce2Go.

Since my laptop was shipped with Windows ME (the cheapest alternative---Linux, as now, was not available), technical support has twice insisted that I "need to reinstall the operating system that is shipped with the system and then run Dell Diagnostics for verifying the hardware". I left Windows ME on a very small partition, so it isn't that difficult to do this, but it is annoying to have to do this for every little problem. So if you decide to go with a Dell, set some HD space aside for emergencies---I think the diagnostics may run under FreeDOS.

Ditto for the mouse problem. It seems to be application/desktop-specific, though.

So, I had a bad DVD drive. It was replaced with little resistance. The track point wandered, but this was fixed by a BIOS upgrade. The last thing that happened (source of the caveat above) is that the lower-right touchpad button died intermittently---a technician replaced it this week.

Ditto the 3-year support contract suggestion. Good luck.

Re:Inspiron 8000

[njb42]

The Inspirons are, or were, made in Taiwan by Compal. My Winbook Z1 is also made by them. Oh yes, and my Winbook ran Mandrake 8.1 very well, both with the stock kernel and with a 2.4.17 kernel I built myself.

Scrollbar?

[aquarian]

I wonder about that scroll bar, does it work with Linux and Linux apps? The reason I ask is that it doesn't even work with all Windows apps. I rely on it a lot since I have to do a lot of web surfing, and I use IE because the scrollbar works. (Mozilla doesn't.) I'd wipe Windows right off this thing if I knew I could get this with Linux. Right now I'm running VMWare and Redhat without X for web development. I haven't tried X on the T20 yet.

BTW, is that scroll bar just equivalent to a mousewheel, or is it something else?

I love my T20, they'll have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers!

Re:Scrollbar?

[swillden]

As far as I know the scroll bar doesn't work with Linux. I never used it under Windows, either, so it's not a problem for me. Apparently it's not just equivalent to a mouse wheel, because mouse wheels work fine under Linux (at least the one on my MS Intellimouse does).

I just use the scroll button as a middle button. I like having a three-button mouse.

IBM T-23

[sportal]

The IBM T-23 is great under Linux. I'm running Debian Woody (3.0) on it, and it works perfectly.

• 1.2Ghz Mobile Intel Pentium III - also works great as a lap warmer when compling the kernel.
• Upgraded to 1 GB Ram - Enable 4GB ram mode in Linux Kernel
• up to 60GB 5400RPM drives (Mine has 48gb)
• CD-RW/DVD Combo
• integrated 802.11b Ethernet (mini-PCI, use the linux-wlan-ng drivers to support this) The built in antennas make it feel like a 100mW pcmcia card (though it's only 30mW)
• integrated Intel 10/100 - Supported in Kernel
• integrated 56k win modem - Supported under linux
• 14.1" 1400x1050 TFT Screen with SuperSavage Chipset (supported by Xfree86 4.1, download latest driver from www.s3graphics.com)
• Audio supported under linux - install modules i810_audio soundcore ac97_codec
• Use the UltraBay Battery and get over 6 hours of battery life (with all the convservation options turned on).
• APM, USB, IR works.

Re:IBM T-23

[Capablanca]

how do you use the the linux-wlan-ng drivers to support it? e.g. from mandrake 8.2?

Portable Caldera

[jpthegeek]

About a year ago I installed Caldera's E-Desktop (current version at the time) and had everything working but the sound on a Toshiba Satellite 3545CDS. 350MHZ AMD K-6, 32MB RAM. Was slow but it all worked quite well.

Re:This is a good topic. Any Linux Friendly Laptop

[filbert009]

your lead out is totally bunk.... gun control = we all get hammered by the crooks and the politicians will laugh as they beat us down as well!

Fujitsu Lifebook P Series

[[AraGorn]]

I just got my Lifebook P Series (the little guy with the Crusoe) and so far things are working well I am still looking for sound drivers and haven't even tried to get the modem working yet but everything else that I have tried seems to work just fine.. if anyone knows of sound drivers for this machine I will have basically all I need to get rid of Windows (playing DVD's is all I use windows for right now)

Fujitsu-Siemens comes with Linux preinstalled

[KjetilK]

Some of Fujitsu-Siemens' notebooks are certified to work with Linux (Suse and RH), and you can get the Lifebook C and Amilos with Linux preinstalled.

My mother wants a laptop, and I think one of these will be the choice.

However, I want built-in Bluetooth support, and a Crusoe and DDR RAM would be nice too.

Me too, but...

[salimma]

... beware, my new iBook and the new TiBook both has a USB softmodem from Conexant. Ended up having to buy a serial-to-USB adapter so I could reuse my trusty serial modem...

Screen is brilliant though :) Even mirroring works - I just have to pin down a refresh rate that can work on both my 12.1" internal and 15" external LCD.

Running Debian Woody - install's a bit dodgy on the snapshot CD I tried but after that it worked like a charm.

Michel

Partial solution to garbled screen...

[salimma]

... instead of hitting the power button, from the console just use the TLA ctrl-alt-delete, the default setting in Linux is to trap this and perform 'shutdown -r now'; otherwise edit your /etc/inittab.

HTH :)

Michel

Try Here

[jasonw61]

This is pretty good list

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/

another good method to determine Linux compatibility is to search for "Linux and the model number of a laptop" that you are interested in, using Goggle

Laptop 2002

[howellcc]

Back in January I purchased a Dell inspiron 4100. I dual boot it with WinXP and Mandrake 8.1. Everything I use on it works beautifully on both OS's, even the built in wireless NIC. Granted due to having everything built in I don't really use my PCMCIA slots. I'd highly recommnend it to anyone.

dell lattitude c510

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to have a insipron 8100. And I grew to hate it.
Suspend didn't work well it weighed the same as 2 bricks

It was stolen now I have a lattitude c510. It is lovely. The
only downside is it has a celeron processor but for me thats
fine. (512Mb makes up for it!)

installing redhat 7.2 on the 8100 was a pain. Updating
the NVIDIA driver was a pain.

I have made 2 changes to the pcmcia config in order to
get the wireless network card going otherwise it runs
out of the box (I also updated xfree86 for no particular
reason)