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

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.