hey all I plan to be geting myself a laptop soon mostly for college usage working on assingments and whatnot and surfing the net, watching a dvd, etc. Anyway I definately am going with a non windows based laptop. I have been definately considering apple and I'm most likely to get that.

The Apple comp I am looking at is an 12" ibook 1GHZ G4/256MB RAM/30GB HD/Combo drive/Airport wireless card for $1,088 with student discount. I will most likely be runing mac os x on here but if i get tired of that might install linux.

Anouther option i have considered to save some money is geting something like pentium 800 mhz erra pc laptop. I looked at thinkpad T22 or so and I didnt realy like them though because I prefer a touchpad based mouse as oposed to the type used on the thinkpads. The bigest problem with the pc laptops is its hard to find one that all the hardware is supported under linux and will work. An example would be the modem One Important part for me is to have a laptop with a good batterly life. I will of corse need to get a wireless card for a pc if it doesnt allready come with one. Also I there are some brands I would like to stay away from these mainly being HP and Compaq. Just personal prferences seen to many crumy pcs made by them both laptop and desktop systems. Hopefully someone here will have some sugestions on a pc laptop and I not looking to spend anymore then the ibook.

Oh and I am wondering what might be the best platform computer to get between a pc and that ibook in the $1,100 or less range. Would i get beter performance from the ibook or from a pc with linux? Thanks.

Well, you can pick up a base model IBM Centrino R40 off of newegg.com for about $1300 if I remember right, so thats what I would say go with. The 12" iBooks are nice, but they are very small, and if you plan on lugging it to class with you, you might want to look for a Centrino book with better battery life. I know you said non Windoze, but currently, Linux doesnt support all of the Centrino stuff that I know of. I was debating between the IBM T40, and the Powerbook 15". The IBM doesnt have a DVD burner, but it does have a 7 Hr battery life with the extended battery, so I ultimately decided to go with that. Even with my student discount, the Powerbook would have still been at least $2000 or more, and Im getting the IBM for about $1600. I know the R40 is standard issue for our law and pharmacy schools here, and no one that I know of has had any problems out of theirs. Good luck.

I just bought a laptop the other week for purposes of dual booting windows+mandrake. There are a lot of good deals out there for buying an IBMcompatible, and I got a 40 mb, 2.6 ghz celeron processor (equivalent to a 2.0-2.2 P4) with 256 mb ram from Toshiba for 850 bucks at Best Buy. If you are looking in for really cheap, you might want to go to the refurbished online outlets, or even possibly ebay. Getting the hardware that is supported can be a problem if you buy from Dell (which does funky stuff with the bios) HP or other main name brands, but Toshiba works great and Sony and Fujitsu.

Mandrake 10 community and Compaq Pressario 700 series are a good match......the only thing that didnt work straight after install was the modem and after a quick trip to linuxant site that was also working full steam ahead.

What a great way to permanently retire the windows XP Home that was preinstalled

Compaq Pressario 701 AP (Australian Model)
AMD Athlon 1 Gig
256 Ram
14" TFT
DVD/CD Rom
56K
10/100


Now all I have to do is teach the owner how to use it hehehe.

I am running Gentoo on a 12.1" 900mhz/640mb iBook G3 and I can definitely recommend it. The hardware is excellent, the battery life unbeatable, and everything on my book works. dvd/cdwr, NIC, radeon 7500, airport, modem. etc. etc.. You definitely want a G3 if you want wireless, cause the Airport Extreme isn't supported yet. As far as OS X I can't really comment. I used it for about 2 hrs before installing Gentoo over it.

I put some info in the Hardware Compatibilty List here at LQ if you care to see it, click the HCL link at the bottom of my post here.

Good Luck!