I was rather recently told that I'll be getting a laptop before I go to uni, so over the last two weeks I've been reading numerous Linux related laptop sites, including a few sites that sell laptops with Linux pre-loaded. The docs were pretty good (although outdated, which in the laptop world is understandable I guess, from what I read it updates itself something like every 3 months?), but the linux laptop sites were mostly US, and I really don't want to have to ship it from home to the US if something goes wrong. In fact, I think I've found the one that I want, but am rather nervous over compatibility. I really don't want to be forced to use Windows

http://www.nethighstreet.com/NOTEBOOKS/propcframe.html

Though I'm normally quite dubious about buying expensive things online, I've dealt with these guys before and they're pretty good. Bought my first comp from them and will be getting the second from them as well. Apart from upgrading the RAM to 512, the default settings are fine, but I'm wondering if anyone can see from this description - or perhaps provide reassuring anecdotal evidence - whether I'll be facing any major compatibility issues? The Firewire and USB2 I don't really care about.

All that I'd really want is X to work well, preferabbly with Acceleration but obviously not much since it's shared RAM . I'm thinking of the occasional slow moment when a quick blast at Chromium would be great . Again, from what I've read, Sis 650 seems to have Linux support, and I called up the shop today and asked them if the amount of RAM given to the video card was configurable through the BIOS or not - it is. This was instigated by a rather frightening read, not sure whether it was here or at the Gentoo forums, about an Intel driver that dynamically assigned RAM to the video card, and the BIOS gave it a maximum of 800KB! *shudder*

Anyway, as well as X, I'd like to have the Ethernet card working, although at a stretch if it didn't I could put a supported card in the free PCMCIA slot. I think the ethernet is Sis as well. Sound would also be great, but I'm pretty confident in the ALSA guys to have that down pat already. Also, where might I find the current state of ACPI support? I've read that it's rather flaky at the moment, but again, that's just from random searches on Google I've got that. Is this still the case? Is it ACPI that controls stuff like suspend to RAM/suspend to disk?

I've seen drivers on the web for Synaptic touchpads - are these not already integrated into distro's? Mouse emulation through the numpad is an awful experience I never want to relive again. Say it ain't so!

Finally, I'll mainly be using this laptop to ferry files from home to the computer labs at school, so I'll need some way of transferring files from one to the other. I'm already intending on investing on a router (no, unfortunately there are no almost dead machines lying around to NAT with) to connect mine and my brother's PC to the net, so I'm thinking that an ethernet connection from the laptop to the router, and mounting an area of my hard-disk would be sufficient to share the files. Would this be through NFS? If so, I'll have a look on tldp for NFS docs before I pester you guys with any more questions about it.

Whew, babbled a bit there, but oh well. Laptop! Heheh

"Would this be throught NFS?" -- if you're sharing files only with other linux machines, yes. if you're sharing with linux and windows machines, then no, you'd need to use samba.