I picked up this laptop at Wal Mart. It comes with 3GB of RAM, an AMD Turion 64x2 processor, NVidia graphics and sound cards, Synaptics touchpad, and Atheros wireless.

Installing Linux on this machine was very straightforward. Once the proprietary driver was installed for the graphics, madwifi-hal for the wireless, and the synaptics xorg driver for the touchpad, the machine plays very well with Linux.

I'd recommend this as an excellent budget laptop for the Linux user as it has extremely good specs considering the low price.

Picked up a HP G71 the other week and installed Slackware v13.0 ... and there are some issues:

.01. No sound. Right now the answer for this one has me stumped. Any ideas?

.02. Modem is "busy"? The commands show but the on-board 56k modem is always "busy."

Based on experience with Suse v10.0 on a Dell Inspiron 5100 which I've used for years, I've gone down the checklist I have here to get the on-board modem working with KPPP as the dialer of choice but no luck at all. You might note I've also had the identical problem with Slackware on this Dell machine, which I still use to gain access to the Internet, With Suse v10.0 I use the following and have never had a problem getting Linux to work with the on-board modem:

.a. with "/opt/kde3/bin/kppp" I used Chown root.root
.b. With "/opt/kde3/bin/kppp" I set chmod +s
.c. with KPPP I set SUID
.d. With "kppp.allow" I've set "me" as the sole user.

It makes KPPP work like a charm when using Suse v10.0 but this does NOT work with Slackware, There are in fact NO FILES in Slackware's OPT. Written inquires to Slackware were ignored, as well as postings to the "Official Slackware" site, which has repeatedly proven to be a waste of time. Any ideas?

tyc