I've been looking for a good, inexpensive laptop to put Linux onto and I stumbled across a seemingly awesome deal on a lower-end Compaq Presario R3000Z. The distribution that I am considering is Gentoo but others aren't out of the question. I heard that compatibility is pretty "hit or miss" with Gentoo. Can anyone spot any potential Linux problems with the following specs? The "54g(TM)" wireless makes me wonder if that might require proprietary drivers. Also, while I'm writing, does anyone know about the general reliability and performance of these laptops? I'm kind of curious how well a swap partition on a 4200 RPM drive will work since the laptop only has 256 MB of RAM.

-Brandon

Compaq Presario R3000Z:
AMD Athlon(TM) XP-M 2800+ (1.60 GHz/128K L2 cache)
15.0" TFT XGA (1024 x 768)
nVidia GeForce4 Go
256MB DDR SDRAM
60GB 4200 RPM Hard Drive
8X DVD Drive
54g(TM) Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN
Built in 56K Modem
Built in 10/100 LAN
PCI I/II PCMCIA slot
USB 2.0

I've never had any real problems with those laptops. Wireless will run with ndiswrapper on the laptop. I have Compaq laptop's with Mandrake, MEPIS, and Fedora, with no major issue's. Takes about an hour to install and get everything running.