Well I may as well be honest upfront here. I'm totally green to Linux . Hopefully I have viewed my last blue screen of death. I'm fed up with MS Windows, Virus Software updates,and the constant nightmare of losing data after a crash or virus. I've made up my mind to move on too linux. I've done some reading and I like the sound of haveing a near virus free environment to operate in. I've narrowed my choice of distributions to two SUSE 10 and Xandross. I'm leaning towardS SUSE but I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. I have been looking for laptops and I and I'm also concerned about hardware conflicts. I went to Alienware.com and took a look at what they have but the notebooks I like are a little pricey. I went to getyourgadgets.net and found two brands that I like Acers and HP's, they are listed as linux friendly . The sales guy said that both of these brands work well for linux and he even suggested that I talk with some more experience linux users. Would I be safe in purchasing either brands in general and have everthing work.

I'm not a heavy gamer or anything but I would like things like the dvd to play without stalling. Most of my uses will be for Sales and presentation for clients. I'll be using the wireless lan heavily though. I know I haven't given you much to work with but right now I just trying to find a starter home in the linux world.

maillavell

I would recommend not buying a brand new laptop, especially if it will be your first GNU/Linux system. I doubt you have the time to figure out why all your peripherals aren't working the way they work in Windows.

What you can do is bring a live CD to a notebook store, and ask if you can boot a floor model with it. Check out and see if all of the major functions of the notebook work and pick that one up.

if you really want a to put linux on your first laptop once you find one you like you should check out linux on laptops to see how well it has worked for others. Should make your life much simpler.