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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."
Debian Woody on an iBook 500. Everything works, once I compiled a kernel from Ben H.
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
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
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.
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