The Inspiron 3500 is a pretty solid and fully-featured laptop. They came in a few configurations and many of them have a Pentium II 400MHz CPU or something similar. The 3500 has two PCMCIA slots, onboard sound and graphics via Neomagic 256AV (on most of them), a large screen, one USB port, and a module bay for drives.
This laptop is very much Linux compatible, as long as you don't care about audio. The Neomagic 256AV video/audio card in my 3500 will not work with Linux (after the 2.4 kernel I believe) and there does not seem to be any way to get it working for the time being. The video support is just fine though. There is a commercial driver (about $30 I think) if you really need the audio though.
Everything else works fine, I use a PCMCIA wireless card or ethernet card with it and a USB mouse. My 400MHz PII version of the 3500 is fast enough to run Gnome and all of the usual applications so it is certainly usable (I upgraded it to 192MB of RAM though).
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