[Gllug] London laptop recommendations

[Richard Huxton]

Jason Clifford wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Jun 2007, Richard Huxton wrote:
> 
>> Can't get my external monitor to work at 1280x1024 with the laptop (i810 
>> driver). It'll dual-screen with the internal at 1280x800 and external at 
>> 1024x768 but won't go higher. I can do it with XP, but who wants to?
>>
>> Oh, and I can't get sleep-to-X to reliably work. Don't need it enough to 
>>   spend long with though.
>>
>> Otherwise, everything just works out of the box (and this is a stock 
>> Debian too, not one of your fancy -buntu distros).
> 
> The big advantage with the Ubuntu based distros is that they have done a 
> lot of work to make things like that work well on most laptops. I'm not 
> sure how much of that work has made its way into stock Debian yet.

I chose Etch so I could easily match package versions on my dev server 
and laptop, so I was prepared to put up with some rough edges. Saying 
that, I was surprised at how comfortable the process was.

> At least with Linux you can install it on a standard box. To installed 
> Windows XP on SATA based systems you are required to use the OEM copy that 
> comes with the system in many cases (I have a customer who has that 
> problem and cannot re-install XP Pro as a result).

Following a repartitioning error, I had to reinstall the laptop's XP. 
Considering I had the original disks it was a slow and painful process. 
The only plus was that the process removed all the "free trial" cruft 
Dell bundle for your disappointment.

-- 
   Richard Huxton
   Archonet Ltd
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