I will be buying a netbook this xmass and I was wondering if anyone knew of certain models that seem to run various linux os without trouble.
My guess is to stick to the main manufacturers like Asus,Acer,HP,Toshiba,Lenovo,Samsung and Sony. To be honest I generally favour Asus, however if there is a particular model that seems to be made for linux o/s I will consider it.

Part of the reason I ask is that I live in China but do not speak Chinese (much) and I want to avoid as many problems as possible.
Also I know damn well all the netbooks here will come preinstalled with winblows so i'll have to get rid of that right away.

Anyways any help or suggestions would be great.

Thanks.

Almost every netbook is user friendly nowadays.
I have an ASUS EeePC 1005HA and it's 100% compatible with Fedora 14 for example.
I also know that the whole series of EeePC 1005 is compatible since at least two of my friends have one with Linux installed as well.
I once had trouble installing Linux on an Acer Aspire One D150, due to the Atheros Wifi driver messing around with the keyboard and touchpad, but a change of drivers (ndiswrapper) changed that.
I have also seen some very good HP and Lenovo netbooks that are 100% linux compatible (there used to be a program for junior high students in Greece being given netbooks for free by the Hellenic Government provided they had both Windows AND Linux pre-installed and fully supported)

Not sure if available in China.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/products/smartbook.htm

I have 2 older Asus EEE Netbooks. A 701SD and a 900. Both run any flavor of Linux OK.

Asus and Toshiba recently came out best in a reliability survey of laptops, so their netbooks should be good too.
I've got an Asus eeepc 1001HA running Ubuntu Netbook Edition (Gnome DE) OK, and will be trying Slackware on it sometime.

Great thanks everyone for the input. I had been researching this subject for a while and have always leaned towards Asus (my desktop) but it's just nice to hear comments from so many others.

Thanks again.

The number of reports of netbooks working perfectly is surprising if it means that every feature of those netbooks works perfectly in every situation. Hardware manufacturers, both of netbook components and of netbooks, provide special drivers and naturally concentrate on the most popular OS, on Windows. Some provide Linux drivers but far from all. This means the job of creating many Linux drivers is left to the FOSS community, most of whom are enthusiastic volunteers often without access to manufacturers' technical documentation on the components. The end result is that Linux drivers are not fully functional; when they have reached the stage of "good enough" the limited resources move on to more important/attractive development.

A factor when choosing a netbook to run Linux is therefore how good is the driver support for the hardware. Even when netbooks are supplied with Linux installed, this is no guarantee that they are fully functional; many such laptops are bought to have pirated Windows installed; there is little intention that the Linux will be used.

How to find out which netbooks are best supported? Reviews and user reports are helpful but may not cover every feature in every situation. Another source of information is kernel config information or this alternative. A netbook for which the manufacturer has worked closely with a distro developer should be good.

To give a personal example of "good enough", on my Samsung N150 netbook I spent many happy hours researching and trying to get everything working but:

• The WiFi LED is always on, even when WiFi is disabled.
• The Fn+F4 key combo to toggle between internal and external screens only works during early boot and after logging on to the desktop.
• The camera is untested.

For those who are as simple-minded as I am, clicking on this link gives "404 not found".
You have to go to:
http://share.kevin125.com/kernel/
and download and unzip to get to:
linux-2.6.35.7/drivers/platform/x86/Kconfig

hi expat

I bought a toshiba netbook two weeks ago. It is a model NB305-N442-BL.
I bought the 2 gig memory upgrade, and a 320gid hard drive. On the new
hard drive I installed the full version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
The memory module is part number CT1290251 2GB, from Crucial.com.

Everything works out of the box except for being unable to turn off the
wireless radio and decrease the screen brightness.

The two gig of ram should be a required install. it makes a big difference
in how fast programs load.

I haven't found a way to turn off the wireless yet, but am still researching
it.

Other than these two problems, I think my netbook on linux is the greatest.

Hope this info is useful to you

Vanessa

Thanks for the update

catkin

the link you provide is a link to a kernel. are you saying that this kernel works better
with netbooks than the standard kernel in Ubuntu lts?

Ive never done anything with compiling kernels so how would I go about it?

thanks
Vanessa

Thanks all. I finally bought my netbook after about a month of research and I ended up getting the IBM thinkpad x120e with the new amd apu e-350 and 4gb ram, now i'm looking forward to throwing mint 11 on it.