[sclug] Laptop

[Alex Butcher]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, tim wrote:

> Hi from Egypt, possibly the furthest sclug member from the Thames valley.
>
> Just after a bit of advice.
> I am looking at buying  a new laptop. Currently have a Dell Inspiron 8100 
> which I have been very happy with. Apart from the first few weeks. It is dual 
> booted with XP Professional and SUSE 9.
> Windows is the most used.
> I want to move to Linux as much as possible and have a windows boot just for 
> stuff I have to do on windows.
> Can anyone recomend a make of laptop that is particularly good with Linux. I 
> dont want to spend hours getting stuff like screens , modems, dvd drives etc 
> working. I like playing about with Linus but would rather choose what.

IBM seem to do quite a good job of putting together compatible,
well-specified and compatible machines. Some of Toshiba's laptops work well
with Linux, others not so well.

Personally, I'd see what's on the market, then check
<http://www.linux-laptop.net/> and USENET (via google groups - 'Toshiba
3000-214 linux' or whatever being a useful search term) for other users'
recipes/horror stories and pick a laptop whose install that you feel you can
handle. That's what I did when I bought my Tosh in early 2002.

Note also that many of the lower-tier vendors (and, these days, even Tier-1s
like Toshiba and HP in some cases) will just be reselling identical laptops
from (mainly) Taiwanese ODMs such as Clevo, Uniwill, Quanta and Compal. More
info available by googling for terms such as 'clevo compal odm'. This means
that if you find one model that works well with Linux, you can usually
assume that a similarly specified and identically-cased model from another
vendor will work too. To give an example I know:

<http://tinyurl.com/3l4u9> - Toshiba Satellite 3000-214
<http://tinyurl.com/5s33s> - Compal ACL00

> Thanks
> Tim

HTH,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>