Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 9
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Kernel (uname -r):
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2.6.9
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Distribution:
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Slackware 10.0
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I initialy encountered a few problems with resizing the HD, but this was attributable to Partition Magic's 'trickery'. All problems were resolved by using the second Slackware disc which acts as a live CD and mounting linux partitions manually. Ethernet card required configuration for the network, and upgrading to 2.6.* kernel was straightforward (see details of upgrading kernel in sticky at the top of slackware forum).
The only thing I've left to configure is the wireless network card, but there are lots of people who have achieved this (see the Dell section of http://www.linux-laptop.net for links).
The only third party driver I've had to use so far has been for the wireless network card which can be obtained from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
*edit
I managed to configure the wireless network card. The problem was that I did not have the same wireless network card as the howto's listed at linux-laptop.net. This Latitude X300 had a broadcom wireless network card which I finally configured using the the ndiswrapper and the bcmw15 windoze driver. I had a bit of trouble getting the latest & greatest ndiswrapper version to work so dropped back a few versions to I think 0.11. I've not bothered trying the latest versions (1.2) as it works fine for the time being (although there are a few nuances that an upgrade may fix, but functionality isn't compromised).
All in all a lovely laptop, looks good (esp with fluxbox :-) and as always with slackware highly configurable, transparent (i.e. you can find all the config files/programs etc.) and pretty damn secure.
If I were to buy my own laptop I'd buy one of these (this one was kindly provided by work, hopefully they'll let me keep it after a year or so :-)
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