[Sussex] Laptop for Linux?

[Mark Harrison]

I need a new laptop.

"Need", not in the sense of "oh, darling, I'm _soo_ out of date on this old
thing", but "need" in the sense of "The PCMCIA slot has broken (you can hear
it ratlling, and the POST gives 'critical disk warnings' everytime I boot."

Even better news - the particular client which has insisted I use Windows
when I'm on their network is now prepared to provide me with one of their
PCs when I'm in their office :-)

To date, my Linux has all been server-based. It's time to make the jump to
Linux on the laptop for me.

Couple of questions, then:

1: What do you recommend in terms of laptop vendors? Are some pro-Linux (in
the sense of drivers available) and others well to steer clear of (Sony???)

2: Which distribution?

3: Which applications?

What I need is the following:

- OpenOffice.org for office applications

- A mail client that can talk to a POP3 and IMAP server, present a GUI
roughly equivalent to Outlooks, AND import a bunch of messages including
about 30 subfolders from Outlook Express, and a similar bunch from a PST
file.

- Something that can read and edit Visio files.... (this is a big scarey
must-have.) I do a lot of work with Visio, particularly on WAN diagrams, and
have both a legacy data store of Visios, and a bunch of clients who need to
interchange such info, and find that an excellent tool in which to do it.
I've been using Visio since the early 1990s, when it was a Roderick
Manhattan product, before Visio International came along, and WAY before
Microsoft bought it :-)

- Good support for 802.11b

What would be desirable, but not required, is the following:

- Came with Linux pre-installed :-)

Regards,

Mark