Hello,

This is my first thread here.

I'm looking to get myself a laptop to do web development work on and I am thinking about purchasing a HP nx5000 series laptop, specifically a centrino model: DU302a (Intel P-M 1.4GHz 256MB 30GB).

Could anyone here advice me as to how well Fedora will run on this laptop (would any other distros work any better)? The packages I'm most interested in working with are Apache, MySQL, php and Subversion, I need to be able to connect to the web via WLAN and LAN. As I want to be able to get Fedora running quickly and easily on it without having to do allot of patches and fixes.

If its going to require allot of work to be able to use all of the capabilities of the laptop I will probably go for an ibook instead as all I am really interested in is a laptop that can run Apache, MySQL, php and Subversion, has a good battery life, wireless LAN and is quite portable (not too heavy or bulky). I don't want allot hassle getting it all to work, as I need to get started working very soon.

Cheers,

Danielb <--

I got the same laptop on the weekend. I installed Suse 9.1 though - after downloading the correct firmware from ipw2100.sourceforge.net and a little bit of fiddling - I got the WLAN working. (I say fiddling because the configuration doesn't seem to be any different than it was before the fiddling except that now it works and before it didn't).

If you install Fedora, you may have to compile the broadcom ethernet drivers yourself. I tried Mandrake 10 which didn't setup either of the network adaptors - one of the reasons I tried Suse.

It's not the lightest laptop - but it's quite a comfortable size. The XGA screen means only 1024x768 which is unfortunate - I would however upgrade to 512Mb for development. Both the screen and speakers are way better than my Dell Latitude D500 - the case itself however is not a slick as the Latitude.

Adi