Looking to find a Turion laptop to run various distros.
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Looking to find a Turion laptop to run various distros.
I have been running Linux for a little ofver a year and have heard rave reviews about 64-bit processing from my peers. I would like to get one of the less expensive Turion-based systems that has 1GB RAM, and DVD-RW and wireless.
I would not mind a pre-loaded distro like red hat or suse ad long as it WORKS, with all the onboard hardware. In fact, I would prefer a pre-loaded system so that I do not need to pay for a Windows license that I will not use.
I know HP is a supporter of Suse in their desktops but can only find Intel redhat systems with Dell and that is not what I would like, 64-bit seems to be the bomb and is the newer technology.
Buy Turion MT rather than ML because uses 25W instead of 35W. In the US it is hard to find a Linux laptop. HP used to offer a Linux laptop, but it was geared to the corporate crowd and too expensive. From what I have seen, it is cheaper to buy a Windows machine than to buy a linux machine. I suspect Microsoft is manipulating the market and twisting some arms to keep it that way. My advice is to steer away from the well-known brands and get your laptop custom built. There are a number of companies that will built your laptop without windows and let you specify quality memory, a faster harddrive, etc. See:
AVA Direct, Hypersonic PC, ABS, or Vicious Gaming PC and check out links in this Notebook buyer's guide: http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=72162
Roughly half the laptops in the world are made by Quanta or Compal--they are just rebranded as Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, Gateway. Save money and buy from the little manufacturers who use the same parts.
Also I want to add that I find 64 bit Linux on a Turion to be a royal pain in the ass, especially if you plan on installing proprietary multi-media codecs, flash, the latest version of OpenOffice, etc. There aren't 64 bit versions of a lot of programs, so you have to do some pretty complicated things to get them to install. I installed 64 bit Ubuntu on a Turion laptop and spent several weeks trying to get everything to work correctly. If you like to muck around with stuff, go play with 64 bit, but if you just want things to work out of the box, install 32 bit linux on your 64 bit machine. In 6 months or so, OpenOffice will finally get around to compiling in a 64 bit environment and gnash will be a good replacement for 32 bit Macromedia flash, but until then, you are going to spend a lot of time playing with chroot or some other complicated solution. Personally, I don't think its worth the trouble for the performance you will gain. Let me give you an example. The 64 bit libraries don't interact well with the 32 bit libraries, so cut and paste doesn't work correctly between gedit and OpenOffice. Its so annoying that I have switched to Abiword and gnumeric. If you use 64 bit, be prepared for hassles when you try to use programs outside your distribution's repository.
Buying 64 bit Turion is probably still a good idea because the bugs will eventually be ironed out and 64 bit is more future compatible, but realize that Pentium M outperforms the Turion in most categories in 32 bit environments.
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