I currently have three laptops:
- an old Thinkpad 760, currently not doing much collecting dust and waiting to be sold.
- a Dell Latitude CPi300XT, which has been a joy since I first got it. Works wonderfully with Linux, no problem with sound or anything.
- a Thinkpad 366MHz 600E, which is my current computer of choice.

Yes, I know, those are probably not quite up to the spec if you're looking to buy a new one but they work very well for me and have been very cheap (actually, I've gotten all of them for free). Being a poor a student, I don't buy a lot of new hardware, but I make good use of old stuff!

It seems a lot of people have trouble getting the onboard sound on the Dell CPi and Thinkpad 600E working, so I'm planning on writing a little something on post it somewhere.

By the way, I used to have an Apple Wallstreet (first generation "wetsuit" Powerbooks, 292MHz G3 CPU), which ran Linux well with Ben's PPC-Linux patches. If you're looking to buy a new laptop to run Linux on you should take a close look on the new Apple iBook G4, which offers excellent performance and features for the price!

Håkan

I have had some issues with getting my Dell Latitude D600 to get along with Mandrake 9.1, but nothing very special. Had to recompile the kernel to get the ACPI to work, including the infamous DSDT hack (acpi.sourceforge.net). Now ATI have drivers supporting XFree 4.3 for my Radeon Mobility 9000, which was not the case a little while a go - works nice now. The sound daemon hangs sometimes, but this I can bear - it was a lot worse in the beginning. Ah, yes, and the DMA for the harddrive isn't working; some kernel troubles, I've heard, but I haven't cared for upgrading (I'm using 2.4.21).

I just discovered that the second Mobility Radeon 7500 in my laptop works perfectly fine when I configure the BIOS to activate it and start X -- I connected an NEC VT4600 projector to the VGA port and I got my desktop projected. Cool

I didn't even explicitly configure it in XF86Config, either -- I might be able to do Xinerama.

So, I went to my local MicroCenter today and asked them about their OS policy with laptops. Except for their Macs, of course, they sell all their laptops with Windows XP pre-installed and you don't get the OS media. You get a recovery disk only. That blows. How does that work if your hard drive crashes?? And you have 56K??

Have any of you just bit the bullet, bought the laptop with XP, and then just reformatted the hard drive? I think I read, the other day, where somebody was having trouble with that because of the way their hard drive was setup to use the recovery disk, or some such.

Microsoft has 'em by the ...

Now, I would put Windows 2000 on it, but I have no interest in Windows Xtra Pay. I'll bet I'm going to run into that at almost any store I walk into in the Dallas area and try to purchase a laptop.

There's a local computer shop out here in the country where I can get Windows XP or ThizLinux installed on the laptop he sells, but I don't know, yet, who actually manufactures that laptop and what kind of quality it is. It looks like laptops I've seen in other little shops where the shop basically sells it as their own.

Does anybody know if that is a common thing and is there like one or two manufacturers that make these 'generic' laptops? It has a 15.1" display, Athlon XP 2000, DVD/CD-RW, 256MB RAM, 30Gig HD, 4 USb ports (all from his ad in the local paper) Don't know what video it has, but it's probably shared memory or something, that you, well, that I, wouldn't normally buy.

Note: Please don't turn this into a Microsoft bashing thread. Let's stick to the laptop issues.

Thanks for all the good replies so far!

I had a generic laptop that I bought from a "linux on laptop" dealer. It worked ok but I didn't know enough about linux to realize it needed apm to control the fan and battery monitor at the time. I still have it and it runs linux like a champ with an acpi kernel. The downside is it has a twister k graphics chip which has no 3d support in XFree86 4.3 though supposedly it's coming with 4.4. The problem is that the place I bought it from didn't have any details on the specs of the modem for instance... so I could look for linux drivers, etc. No support either. Dell sucks but at least for 3 years I have in home service should my laptop malfunction. I think it's a gamble to go for generic but if it's all you can afford then...

So... I'm doing some more research and I came across a site that had a discussion where one of the participants said, well... you don't have to give Microsoft any money for XP... just buy a laptop from someone who will sell you a one without it.. and he said: for instance, Asus.

So, I think ok, I'll check out Asus. So I go there, http://usa.asus.com/products/notebook/nbindex.htm and... bam!! there it is:
ASUS recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional

Maybe there is no disassociating laptops from Microsoft bashing...

Man!!! This is scary!! (well, sort of)...

http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/toshiba.html

Look at the date - 12/Aug/1998 !!

This is like me right now in 2003, almost 2004! Apparently nothing has changed. The Department of Joking (DOJ) hasn't kept Microsoft from controlling the laptop industry. And, I'm sure that since then the EULA has been updated to disallow any attempt to thwart Microsoft from getting paid for my foolish attempt to purchase 'naked' hardware.

Today I went to Fry's and to CompUSA.... They are all Microsoft minions!!!

Well, I guess (baaaaaa...) I should just stop (baaaaa...) whining and factor in the (baaaaaaa...) fact that part of the price of purchasing (baaaaaa..) hardware from a company includes paying the protection money to MafiaSoft!!

Dang!!! Now I'm all distracted from the issue of the laptop hardware compatibility with linux....

That's quite a worrying story!!

Must admit i've not read the EULA for a micro$oft product in a while, but even so!!!!!

Anyway, I'm running a HP compaq Evo nx9005 with RedHat 9.0 but i'm not happy with the way it runs and am considering switching... Mandrake probably!!

Matt.

Actually I'd like to have XP/2000 on my laptop.Lets be honest here - if you do travel a lot and have to connect by dialup at times you can forget about doing that with Linux AFAIK.You'd need to find an access number first then configure it and blah,blah,blah.
Of course the XP on my laptop screwed itself up within 15 minutes so it's only Linux for now.
Been looking into buying a laptop with Linux preinstalled but those guys have a pricing problem.

Yeah... What I want is a laptop I can load my Windows 2000 on and maybe dual boot with slackware or SuSE. I don't want to pay for Windows XP since I have no intention of using it or asking Microsoft's permission to use it. (Hekk, I've already paid for DOS, then paid for and upgraded it to Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, WFWG 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 98 SE, and then bought Windows 2000!! )

And I want to be able to repartition and reformat the hard drive anytime I want to. I think I read somewhere that the setup with new laptops with Windows XP somehow prevents wiping the disk and starting fresh. Maybe that's if there's no floppy drive installed/attached, or something.

Man... I really want a laptop but I don't want to get screwed out of the extra cash for yet another Microsoft OS, or, if I do, at least I want to be able to wipe it off the disk. Or, if I do, I at least want to get the whole Windows XP on CD, not just some stupid recovery disk.

But you know, thinking back, I reckon I've wasted money on worse stuff!

Got mine wiped good - no problem there but if you try to reinstall over a Linux install it wont boot.You'll have to do it twice with Toshibas sorryass recovery DVD.There must be something.
No problems with loading w2k on it whatsoever.

I've got a Dell Inspiron 2500. . .installed RedHat 9 on it, and it works beautifully. The installation went without a hitch. Trying to dual-boot with WinXP however, has been hell. I've got RH to boot properly from Grub now, but XP crashes.

Compaq (now HP) Evo N1000c. Dual-boot Mandrake 9.2 with WinXP Pro. Switched from Red Hat 9.0 that works with XP too. Everything is fine, except for a problem with the touchpad; when I boot without a mouse connected, and try to work with the touchpad, it goes crazy (everything is fine when the mouse is connected). Doesn't really affect me, since I use it as a desktop and barely use the touchpad anyway.

My AMD K6-2/400 Mhz EMachines Slate laptop -- works fine. Only real problem is hard disk size is a bit on the small size (4 Gb) and limited to 256 Mb RAM. I use a PCMCIA SMC 8041TX 16-bit 10/100 NIC and have it configured in /etc/pcmcia/config - no sweat! I've used Mandrake 8.1, 8.2, 9.1 on this, VectorLinux 4.0 was also quite nice, and just purchased SuSE 8.2 Pro - like that quite a bit.
I had a bear of a time trying to get a 32-bit cardbus wireless card to run. Every card I chose (Linksys WPC11 ver. 4, NetGEAR USB MA111, D-Link 650 ver. M1) was mentioned as compatible with wlan drivers usually found in the kernel, but on closer inspection, turns out the cardbus 802.11b card was a newer version than listed in the wlan list. I found a 16-bit Belkin F5D6020 PCMCIA-based card, inserted the card specifications in config files according to HouseOfCraig and worked. Thank goodness for the 30-day return policy of Best Buy - tried 3 cards, kept returning, swapping, finally full refund and bought the Belkin at Office Max.
Only thing left to do on my ToDoList is to get CUPS working with the HP 850C inkjet connected to the WinXP box my wife uses (I do sometimes, too.) Haven't tried this with SuSE and CUPS, waiting for available time.

-*-Bill

I managed to get XP and RedHat 9 dual booting properly with Grub, they both work great ad have been for a week now!! can't seem to get apm support working properly though, no battery icon and with no proper apm support my usual 3.5 hr battery life shrinks to about 1-2 hours!!!

Although I've changed my mind about switching from redhat, i won't yet, and if I do it'll probably be to Slackware.