[Gllug] Suitable Laptop for Ubuntu

[Philip Hands]

On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 11:51:23 +0100, Mick Farmer <mick at dcs.bbk.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dear GLLUGers,
> 
> The subject says it all.  Any recommendations gratefully
> received.

One can see a lot of ThinkPads at Debian gatherings, which would seem to
confirm that they're pretty decent kit without too much in the way of
proprietary hardware -- I'm certainly very happy with the X200 that I
picked up cheap on ebay.  I selected it by finding someone who'd just
bought one, and asking them how painful the install was (which it wasn't
BTW).

Of course, with Ubuntu, the non-free hardware is less of a pain at
install time, which I'd say is actually a disadvantage when asking this
question, since the support for non-free hardware tends to be
comparatively fragile, so I'd prefer that the person I ask had had
trouble with the dodgy ndiswrapper based wifi, say, so that I'd know not
to buy one too.  You can always look to see if Ubuntu's got the machine
flagged as having restricted drivers installed, of course.

Admittedly, mine does have an Intel wifi that needs a non-free firmware
blob, but since the main way of avoiding such issues is to have the same
blob built into the device in flash, I'm willing to let that pass, and
the driver itself is free and in the stock kernel, which is the main
issue, as that ensures smoother upgrades.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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