This is one of the few distros where everything just worked.

Only caveat I had was with a Linksys 802.11B PCMCIA adapter. While Fedora did detect it, it had set it up as an ethernet device instead of a wireless device.

See my webpage:

http://web.ripnet.com/~rdeschen/Dell_Latitude_C600_-_SuSE_8_1.html

Debian seems to have a problem with the video card and sound card. To get the sound card (ESS Maestro), you need to remove (or disable) ESD and install & configure ALSA. The video card (ATI Mobility M3) will only work with the 'vesa' driver.

On the plus side, Debian is 100% compatable with the docking station and all of it's hardware.

RK

Debian fails to handle the soundcard properly. Will get to work on that sometime later.

X works nicely with the standard ati driver - but not if you use a dock. ati driver issue...

Added an Atheros wlan-card later and had it do WPA-PSK on 802.11g using the madwifi driver-suite.

Reasonable keyboard & LCD, excellent dual-expansion-bays holding multiple batteries, CDRW-drives etc, making the thing run *uninterrupted*, as long as you have batteries to exchange on-the-fly. One battery will give you 5-6 hours of operation.

How many other laptops provide multi-battery-operation?

I pack three or four when on the road, outperforming ALL single-battery-laptops :)

Beware of the touchpad-mouse-thing though. On several of the C600's i've seen, the mouse pointer will randomly start wandering around on the screen. Poking at the cabinet, you may get it to stop wandering, which indicates some kind of mechanical failure.

But hey, it's cheap and Dell has a wonderful support-site anchored to your device's ServiceTag. Great idea. Which is just about the only great thing about Dell. No linux-support, no amd, and then this:
Using standard sales channels and being a private customer, it's utterly impossible for me to buy a new Dell laptop without *having* to buy a bundled version of MS WinXP.
I think of this as Microsoft Tax(TM), and for that i think Dell must be properly punished.
Don't buy anything new from Dell!! By employing Microsoft Tax(TM), they help Microsoft being a de facto monopoly, suppressing freedom of choice and generally acting like braindead thugs. At several occasions i have argued with Dell salespeople, tried to reason with them and finally yelled at them in desperation. All i've got from this is that the net saving i'd get by not having to pay Microsoft Tax(TM) is around 50 dollars. Never any refund, and thus never any deal.

Thus; Dell pays less than 50$ for each license in volume quantities.

But Dell hardware is reasonable quality, priced reasonably on the second-hand-market and with nice features.

Buy a used Dell laptop. Never a new one.

I've been installing Slackware on Dell laptops since version 9 of the distribution. I think the end of the line for ease of installation and having the included hardware work, is with this laptop: The Latitude C600 series. Great laptops for Linux distributions.

I got this from my Mom (She bought a new one) :). Installed Arch 0.71 on it. Works beautifully.

Have to install the ATI video drivers for the video card, ALSA for the sound. Have some trouble with the touchpad (But that's a hardware issue; did the same thing under Windows) so I use a USB mouse. I use a Linksys WPC54G (I think) with ndiswrapper, lsbcmnds driver; no problems.

All in all, it's a good laptop for Linux stuff.

Everything seems to work perfect even with the docking station. Didn't have to install any extra drivers. The only thing i can't get to work is the winmodem.

I have a later C600, with the 1Ghz CPU, 1600x1250 screen, 256 RAM, etc. I installed Etch on it, and it went perfectly, except for my WG511, which never works on any distribution, Etch was not able to correctly configure my screen, so I'm playing around with that. My 4460mAh battery provides me about 8 hours of use, up from 6 on Windows. Great laptop, decent hardware (even today) and hardy. I highly recommend it!