[GLLUG] Hi all.. question about hardware purchasing..

[Imran Chaudhry]

> I know device support is pretty good compared to even a few years ago,
> but the little things do frustrate me, never being able to rely on
> suspend/hibernate working correctly on most of the laptops I've owned,
> odd quirks with wifi and graphics chipsets especially and I'm really
> looking forward to a machine that will be able to mesh my OS perfectly
> with the hardware.
>
> Many thanks to anyone who has some tips, I'm pretty interested in
> hearing in general how people purchase the hardware they run Linux
> OS's on anyway.

Hey there Bilal, welcome to the list.

I've only just delurked so you're in good company :-)

I recently purchased two laptops and had exactly the same dilemma. My
approach involved a bit of legwork but it paid off in the end. I'll
reel it off in bullet point order (I'm lazy like that):

* try and stick with Intel brand internal hardware - there is good
opensource support for things like 3D acceleration and wifi (that said
I have machines with an nVidia card and a Broadcom wifi chipset as it
"all works")

* In laptops, Acer and Lenovo have a good reputation for working well
with Linux. For example, I hear many Debian developers have the Lenovo
E520 - a good sign it works well under Debian at least.

* I found http://www.linlap.com a good resource for checking
compatibility of the models that met my requirements in other ways
(there is a rating system on how well it works and it's worth paying
attention to the comments on each model page)

* I checked the Arch Linux forums when I was unsure how a newer laptop
runs. Since Arch is very close to upstream, often things work in that
distro that do not work in others. You mentioned Ubuntu, so you should
be catered for in the latest Ubuntu release. Debian less so if you
stick to stable. I planned to run Wheezy on my new laptops but figured
I could manually installed some packages "out of band" if they work in
Arch.

* If a netbook, be wary as Linux support can be a minefield due to
more "exotic" hardware, especially the latest generation which have
the Intel Cedarview chipset.

With all that in mind and a lot of Googling and forum searching I
bought a Dell Latitude D430 and a netbook: HP Mini 210.

I installed Debian Wheezy on both with Windows in dual-boot - it's
early says but it seems everything works, the only "issue" is that
non-free drivers were required for the network hardware. The Debian
installer told me which packages I needed and I manually installed
them post-install.

Bear in mind that what I bought is not the "latest and greatest" -
this actually helps as there is more chance of support having caught
up.

Hope that helps!

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