Well, I am looking to purchase a new laptop. However, I am having a lot of trouble finding the kind that I envisioned. Perhaps somebody here can point me toward a fitting one.

Essentially, I am looking for the following in a laptop:

Design: It should have a lightweight design. The keyboard and screen should extend (almost) completely to the edge of the laptop. Also, it should be made of a sturdy material. Preferably colored black, but not necessary. No pointless media buttons.

It MUST have built-in serial and parallel ports.

The battery should last over 5 hours with moderate usage. This does not have to be the standard battery, it can be an optional upgrade.

No wireless and no 56k modem. I plan to purchase a hardware modem and a wireless card with antenna connector. Thus, I have no need for built-in wireless/modem capabilities.

Linux compatibility: I want everything thats built into this laptop to be fully and natively compatible with linux. This means no proprietary drivers, windows wrappers, or half-working hardware.

Oh, and some specs:
Something in the vicinity of 1.86Ghz Pentium M, 512Mb DDR (1 DIMM), ~60Gb(7200 RPM).

I've been looking a lot into IBM/HP and other business-class notebooks but they don't really meet these requirements. Am I just dreaming here or can somebody point me to a laptop that is at least something like I described.

Thanks a lot.

I doubt you'll get all that from these two sites, but they will get you the closest.

http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux_laptops.html
http://www.emperorlinux.com/

www.rjtech.com lets you build your own.

Overclockers.com has had a review of them before.

Thanks for the links. However, I couldn't really find any laptop that matched my requirements on those websites. Did you have a specific model in mind or were you just suggesting the websites as possible places where I could find such a laptop.

Thanks again.

IBM R50 and up should satisfy your requirements..Light weight, studry (dropped it about 100 times..), portable, no extra bull (except IBM's pre-installed things), and you can getthem w/out the built-in network devices...

It has no serial port though.

I got some bad news for you. There aren't ANY new laptops out there with serial ports....and precious few with parallel ports. They've fallen out of fashion in favor of USB, which takes up less space and gets used more often.

The best thing you can do is get USB or PC-Card based serial and parallel ports. I do NOT know which ones work with Linux.

I understand that USB is in fashion. USB is great. However, I still want a serial and parallel port and I want it on the laptop, not on the docking bay. Stubbornness? Definitely. A USB or PCMCIA based serial/parallel port MIGHT work with linux and MIGHT work for some purposes. However, I intend to use these ports mainly for custom electronics and programming. I need complete control of these ports and I don't want any extra drivers/hardware getting in the way.

Actually, I recently found the Dell Latitude D610. This laptop seems to have almost everything I asked for when customized and for a reasonable price. It even has a serial and parallel port. It's not black, but I can deal with that. However, I have read some bad things about heavy noise on the headphone output. Does anybody have any experience, advice, or recommendations for this laptop?

Thanks.

The headphone noise only (as far as I know) exists when using the ATI video card, my laptop with the integrated Intel card is fine. The following site was very useful for me when setting everything up:

http://home.comcast.net/~canez/d610/

Hope it works out for you!
TM

If an onboard serial port is a requirement for a brand new laptop, you are severely limiting your choices, as serial ports have fallen out of favor, and your wishlist mixes 90's standards with 00's technology. Otherwise I'd unhesitatingly recommend the IBM T40 (and successors). Can you elaborate on why serial support and the case color is so significant -- J.W.