I'm jonesin' for a laptop!

Instead of asking for advice, etc., I just wanted to know what you have experience with, to get an idea of what's out there.

If I decide to go ahead and get one, I'll probably have it dual boot with Windows 2000 Pro and Slackware and I'm going for as much as I can get for as little as I have to pay!

I only included a few brands, feel free to post about whatever you have actual experience with.

Thanks...

Note: Please substitute the word 'notebook' for 'laptop' if it makes you feel better.

Mine is a Toshiba A10 Satellite Pro. I have had WinXP Home dual booting with Mandrake and Slackware and Redhat and SuSE. No problems at all - apart from the old bugbear ACPI. I believe that Toshiba even have Linux drivers on their site somewhere.

Enjoy.

Dell C600 running Red Hat 8, Slack 9 or Knoppix 3.2 depending on my mood. I'd used a CPi previously and had good luck with Red Hat (with the notable exception of the Crystal sound chip). Infrared and the Winmodem are the only things I've yet to get working on the C600. I got it for under $600 refurb from JustDeals and it's been a champ. Wireless 802.11b, 802.1x authentication via FreeRADIUS using the Meetinghouse Linux client. Life is good.

A Dell C600 here too...
RH(7 .. 9) worked as a charm (aside from the casual bugs.)
Have some issues with the ACPI, but it maybe a BIOS issue.

I had some problems with SuSE (8 & 9)
8 - had to manually modify the network config files to get the wireless to work.
9 - Issues with Xfree, would not configure automatically, solved thanks to linux-laptop.

Ginux

Got a Toshiba A15 with a 2.4 Celery chip.Works fine so far - no issues besides having to figure out one day how to get that suspend thing to work.Didn't worry about the modem at all.Got no idea if that would work.
Didn't like Redhat much but neither do I.

Toshiba Tecra 8100, PIII-500, 384Mb RAM, dual-boot between Mandrake 9.1 and Windows XP Pro (but it spends 99.999% of its uptime in Linux). I haven't had very many problems with it, except maybe a month ago it would "forget" it had a keyboard, and I wouldn't be able to turn it off without having to autofsck when I turned it back on, but I attribute that to maybe it overheating, so I took steps to fix it (raise it up on a few cassette tapes, spaced so air can get under the thing, and leave the lid open as much as possible), and now it's OK.

I have a Gateway 600S with an Intel i845 Brookdale chipset with a Pentium 4-M 2GHz processor and 512MB of PC2100 DDR SDRAM in the SODIMM form factor. I also have a Mobility Radeon 7500 with a 15" 1024x768 XGA flatpanel, a 30GB 4200RPM IBM Travelstar hard disk, an LG/Goldstar GCC-4240N CD burner/DVD reader, two Texas Instruments PC1250 Cardbus controllers, two ICH-based USB ports, and a Linksys WPC11 ver.3 for wireless connectivity.

All of this hardware is well supported by 2.4 and 2.6. I'm running 2.6.0-test9-bk22 right now.

What kind of display resolution are you guys running?

I see a lot of advertisements for laptops with 15 inch displays and they usually have a (1024x768) out beside them. I assume this is like a default but is not a max.

I am thinking that display resolution would be a very determining factor for me.

(I have access to an old Dell P-II laptop with a 15 inch display and it's almost impossible to comfortably read a pdf document with the thing. I think it's set at 1024x768. But, it's not my laptop and I don't know what the gpu is.)

Thanks for the other input so far!

It depends on the display. Some of the ~15" XGA displays will do 1440x990, but mine will only do 1024x768, unfortunately.

I ended up with the "business" Gateway 600S; the "consumer" Gateway 600S has slightly different specs. My father bought it from the wrong part of the website

Most of the problems right now are coming from incomplete Centrino and ACPI support in the kernel, more to do with Intel's muckiness and certain distro's (*cough* RedHat) reluctance to get things moving fast. P3-Ms, P4Ms and AMD-Mobiles are getting muscled to the side for all of the Centrino offerings. Luckily, most everything else on the board these stock Intel chipsets is just fine.

ATI's video cards are a nightmare. They're binary drivers only seem to work on the straight ATI products, only with stock kernels on certain distros, and not their mobile chips. This reminds me a lot of highschool physics where everything only works right in a vacuum, disregarding friction.

Nvidia mobile cards meanwhile tend to rock out.

Intel's i810m, i830m and i845m chipsets suuuuuuuck. Really bad.

Same for Trident mobiles and SiS's new mobile chipsets.

Compaq/HP tend to focus on the dodgiest Trident gear. Dell seems to be in love with ATI, IBM too... Sony used to put a lot of crap propreitary kit in their Viaos, mostly along the lines of obnoxious firewire and USB 2.0 controllers, I don't know if that's still the case.

Overall, as long as you play it right, you can pretty much get a linux compatible machine, front to back, from one of the big manufacturers, but you'll probably have to pay for your pickiness.

Cheers,

Finegan

Not all of ATi's video cards are a pain. Anything older than a Mobility Radeon 9000 is well-supported by the in-kernel XFree86 DRI drivers; that's what I use to get 3D acceleration with my Mobility Radeon 7500. But I do agree that ATi's drivers are a pain in the ass -- over in the Linux forum at Rage3D, we've got a list going of things that we want fixed.

running mdk 9.2 on a compaq presario 2700, everything works great right out of the box. not a single issue, even my two external firewire drives ( hd + dvdrw ) are entirely supported.

Compaq presario 2100 - with mandrake 9/9.2 and RH9
i had pb on 9.2 with my pcmcia installation, pb with my screen on RH9, mdk9 seems to pose no pb
but u got to format all before installing linux on Compaq

i have a HP omnibook 500 -- i'd rather have my hair ripped out of my head than have to install linux on that thing again...

that SUCKED. nothing worked, x crashed, it was hell.
I slapped winders on it and said oh well... gave it to dad. :P

So now i'm using my old trusty compaq.
it works, cept for the modem, but oh well.. lol

I've got a Dell Inspiron 8500 w/ the Nvidia display and 1680x1050 resolution. Fedora runs great on it when you enable acpi. I found some custom acpi scripts from the web for an 8500 and RH 9 so I can take advantage of "laptop_mode" built into the Fedora Kernel (but also available as a patch). Have cpudyn running to regulate CPU voltage. I get over two hours of battery life. I'd recommend it with the addition of checking out the linux on laptop sites about the laptop.

If only you could hotswap easily...