Hi, I've recently been in the market for a new laptop and I'm interested in getting linux on it, probably exculsivly as I am a computer science major and need to learn to program under a linux envirment (plus linux seems really cool). I will be most likely slackware 10 if that matters at all. Now before you write me off as someone who hasn't done his homework I'm familar with linux-laptops.net and I've been doing research on it for about a few weeks now, I'm actually running slack on an older laptop right now. There are, however, a few lingering questions I have.

1) Pentium-M vs Mobile Pentium 4
I've read a few articles on the Pentium-M, it sounds like it has lots of cool features for laptops, but I'm wondering how many of these features work under linux (and what version of the kernel would be nessacry to utilize them). Additionally, even if all these features work, is it worth the speed trade off from the pentium 4. As the mobile p4 3ghz seems to be approx the same price as p-m 1.7ghz (this is more of general laptop question as I am pretty new to them).

2) Brand/Make
The second question is concerning the brand of the laptop, as I really haven't narrowed it down to a specific make and model yet. I was looking at IBM and Toshiba as I heard these companies were very good under linux. IBM seems really pricey compared to Toshiba so I was leaning towards Toshiba. Does anyone have any first hand or second advice about modern Toshiba laptops under linux? Any advice in this area would be greatly apreciated.

3) Widescreen
How do widescreen laptops function under linux? Are they even worth it? The widescreen that is.

4) Digital Sound
I've become something of an audio enthusist as of late due to mp3 (just switched to ogg) collection. I'm been thinking of getting a laptop with digital out for headphones. Does this work under linux? Is it better then analog? Maybe the wrong forum for this last question, I've read alot of articles about actually, most of it seems to come down to personal opinion, and personally I love digital out, but maybe just because my newer better speakers and soundcards have used them. Also if anyone could suggest a laptop with digital out it would be great.

5) Moble Graphics cards
I have an opengl programming course coming up so I felt that this would be needed. Any advice in this area. How much vram should I be looking for? Nvidia vs ATI under linux, and what type of moble card?

Thats all I can think of for now. Thanks for taking the time to read this far.

(note: Please excuse my spelling. I am overly reliant on spellcheck, which I have not got working under linux yet.)

Hey,

Ill try to offer some quick advice / points to ponder.

I recently purchased a new laptop (my old HP ze1210 died in a freak "I'm not turning on for you today" incident), so I had almost the same decision as you to make.

Choice: Toshiba A70 RT-1

Intel P-4M 2.8GHz
40GB HDD
512 DDR 2700
ATI 9000IGP (64MB)
15.4” WXGA Screen
Atheros WLAN

Distro: SuSE 9.1 Pro.

1) P-M vs P-4M
I have been reading about a lot of problems in regards to the P-M's extras, WLAN seems to be the major complaint. Not to say there isn’t any success and that there will not be good support in the near future. I personally decided to go with the P-4M. I wasn’t concerned about battery life too much - I tend to use the unit more in labs (with outlets) then actually in class, and I decided to take the higher clock speeds in the hope of reducing compile times. (Though the new Mobile Dothan chipset should help bridge the gap from where Banias was).
This is really personal preference / price point decision.

2) Brand. I would recommend Toshiba. Decent support, can buy a good warranty (if your worried about dropping it). I have had nothing but good experiences with it so far.

3) Widescreen - The A70 has one, screen config was a bit weird, and I am still not completely satisfied with it, but it works. I have only had it for a few days so I haven’t finished tweaking all the settings.

4) Digital Audio out. - Not to sure on this one.

5) Video Card. - Only real area of disappointment during the install. The A70 has the ATI 9000IGP, I am having a rough go at getting proper 3d support. It works, but not well. NVidia provides better support.

6) Other
WLAN - Atheros Super G - Huge surprise here. It installed and worked perfectly without any config required.

Hope this helps a bit.
Charles

1) Centrino laptops are really only good for the battery life--you're basically paying extra for more lifetime. If you need more than four hours on a charge, they're about your only choice. Since they're so common, though, lots of Linux hackers have been working on getting stuff working on them. They'll be outperformed by a high-frequency P4-M or one of the faster AMD chips. The AMD's are worthy of consideration--you can get an Athlon 64 mobile laptop (eMachines 68xx series) for ~$1200 with rebates, or a slightly more expensive ($1400) Compaq model with a Nvidia card (see below). Don't be swayed by stuff like "centrino technology includes wireless" -- everything nowadays has wireless, and on the off chance you get one without, you can just get a pcmcia wireless card that'll work better than onboard wireless.

2) I've only used eMachines laptops under linux, so that's all I can speak to. The 5312 (earlier model, Athlon XP-M 2400+) works pretty well under Mandrake: acpi works well enough to give me 2.5-3 hours on a charge, and to inform me about remaining battery and all that. Wireless needs some tweaking to work, though. The 6810 (Athlon 64 3200+) has a few other issues under Mandrake 10, but none that should apply to other distros or that can't be fixed.

3) Mandrake 10 automagically runs the display for both the 5312 and 6810 at their native 1280x800. Widescreen's a matter of personal preference, but it does work under linux. I like it, since I can get an opengl output window open on one half of the screen, and the code that created it on the other.

4) Digital output doesn't increase sound quality much, especially if you're just using it for headphones. If you want it, though, you can get an external USB sound module (Creative Labs makes a couple). I got their cheaper one ($40) working under Linux, but it was a little bit of a hassle. They've all got digital and optical ports.

5) ATI doesn't release hardware-accelerated drivers for their newer cards under linux, although the DRI project might have something (I've not looked there yet--going to do that today). You probably want Nvidia; it may be possible to get ATI acceleration working, but Nvidia provides official linux drivers.


Depending on how much price is an issue, I'd go for either the Compaq Athlon 64 model or one of the P4-M's with a Nvidia card. (They sell just plain Pentium-4 (not "mobile") laptops--you don't want one of those. They may as well just not have a battery, and they can serve as spaceheaters).

Another neat trick (or bug, depending on your POV) that the Athlon 64's do is always, no matter what, run at minimum throttle when running on battery. This is still plenty fast for many things, but it might actually be preferable for you.

If you're doing opengl programming, much of the load is going to be on your GPU, but it will still cause your processor to run at 100% load. On a P4-M/Athlon XP-M, this will chew through battery... but the A64's will throttle back to 800MHz when on battery. Shouldn't hurt performance too much, since the GPU's doing the heavy lifting, but will save you battery.

I have an HP pavilion ze5270 with a true P4 - non-mobile - and yes.. it get's pretty toasty sitting on your lap... though that's actually the RAM... It performs well...

P4 2.4 GHz
512 DDR
40 GB HD
built-in floppy, DVD/CDRW combo, 3-USB ports, etc...
no onboard wireless... but my Linksys card works great...

I paid like 1800 for it just over a year ago... it had the ATI chip in it... and I've never been able to get 3D acceloration... it's not a widescreen.. i don't even like widescreens...

I bought this computer because I thought I needed all this power... as I doa lot of Web development/graphics... and I'm constantly on the move...

Looking back on it... the ideal one for me would have been:

Either Centrino, Pentium-m, or Athlon XP-m 2500+
with an nVidia chip...
My battery generally lasts a little under 2 hours.... about 1:45..
not good... but not bad for a true P4...

Actually... a great laptop to buy for linux... is the Averatec H3225....
It's one of the smaller ones with a 12.1" screen... (there is also one with the 15" screen) and an Athlon XP-m... but it's like $1025... with built in wireless... and i've heard nothing but good things about the averatec notebooks under linux.. I'm actually trying to sell mine so i can buy one of those... I really want a mini-notebook.. with a 12" screen... My perfect notebook right now would be that Sony Vaio... little grey one... OR the new Sony Vaio X505... I was going to import it from Japan when I got my taxes (it wasn't available in the US this spring) but it was like $3800 to have it imported... it's like $2999 now... but it's S-W-E-E-T!

Good Luck!

I have an HP Pavilion zt3000 laptop. It has the following specs:
1.5 Ghz Pentium-M (Centrino) processor
Intel 2100B (Centrino) wireless networking card
512 MB of RAM
60 GB hard drive
15.4" WSXGA screen
ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics chipset
CDRW/DVDROM combo drive
1 four pin Firewire and 3 USB 2.0 ports

I run Slackware 10 on this laptop and I generally like it very much.

1) Pentium-M vs Mobile Pentium 4

The Pentium-M has two advantages over a Pentium 4. It consumes less power and it generates less heat. My Pentium-M laptop runs considerably cooler than my old Centrino 466 Mhz laptop. The advantage of a Pentium 4 (or AMD CPU) is of course that you can get one that is faster. They hadn't yet come out with any AMD 64 laptops in my price range when I bought mine (not sure if they had released any at all, actually), so they were never a consideration for me. You should be aware that when comparing the Pentium-M to the Pentium 4 that the added cache RAM for the Pentium-M makes a significant difference in performance and a 1.7 Ghz Pentium-M is reported to perform as well under most conditions as a 2.2 or 2.3 Ghz Pentium 4.

The Pentium-M chip is supported just as well as any other ACPI enabled laptop with processor throttling. It has been well supported in Linux pretty much from the beginning. I formerly ran mine with the alternative ACPI kernel that came with Slackware 9.1 and even then it would throttle down when I had it unplugged. The biggest issue I had is making sure that power/battery monitoring software recognized ACPI correctly rather than APM. I am currently running the 2.6.7 kernel included in Slackware 10 and it works very well for power management. The biggest issue I had was having to load the various ACPI modules in the configuration scripts. I have not investigated the suspend feature under Linux yet, as I don't have that pressing a need for it and I just upgraded my kernel recently. I expect that it would work as well as on any other ACPI laptop, since everything else seems to work as well.

You should be aware that the Pentium-M processor and supporting chipset have no inherent wireless capabilities. Intel's marketing department thought that it would be good to tag this processor and their mini-PCI wireless card both with the Centrino name so that the completely unimpressive wireless card could sell on the shirt tails of the very good mobile processor technology. These two things are in actuality entirely unrelated, and I can replace my Intel wireless card with any other mini-PCI wireless card if I feel like it (which I may very well do at some point to get 802.11a and/or 802.11g capability). Recently however the driver for the card has reached a point where it works quite acceptably, and I no longer use my old PCMCIA wireless card on this laptop.

2) Brand/Make

Both IBM and Toshiba have a good reputation. I also have not run into any showstoppers with my HP, and I wouldn't recommend against it. Another important thing to remember is to look for the feature set that you want. When I bought my laptop, it was hard to find another laptop with the combination of features that I was looking for at a competitive price. If there is one thing I would like to be different about my laptop it would probably be for it to have an NVidia graphics chipset rather than ATI because of their superior binary driver support. The ATI chipset works well for most things, however.

3) Widescreen

I love my widescreen display. I have not had any unusual issues with it (unusual when it comes to laptop screens, that is), and it works great for the times I watch DVDs on my laptop. The problem with laptop screens is that they don't generally give you any specs for the horizontal and vertical frequencies that they run at. I got around this with my laptop by finding a desktop LCD monitor that had exactly the same capabilities as my laptop screen and trying the sync rates for it. It worked out well and I am running Xorg at the native 1680x1050 resolution. I highly recommend running LCD screens at their native resolutions for the best picture quality. For this reason, I don't recommend getting a higher resolution screen than you would expect to be comfortable with running natively. I could have gotten my laptop with a WUXGA screen, but I didn't think that I would care to run a 15.4" screen at that resolution.

4) Digital Sound

I can't really say too much about this because I have never used digital output on a sound card. I incidentally have an external USB sound card with digital inputs and outputs, but I have never used them because I haven't had the optical cables necessary to hook them to my home stereo and I purchased the sound card specifically to use to play music at parties or wedding receptions from my laptop through a mixer, which has no digital inputs. Perhaps I ought to purchase a cable just to test it out.

5) Mobile Graphics cards

My video chipset has 64MB of ram. It works well to play DVDs, and I have also used it to play foobillard. There are some things you should be aware of however. I am using the radeon driver that comes with Xorg because of issues I have had with the binary driver. I had set up the latest binary driver with my 2.6.7 kernel, but this caused issues with the nv overlay that made it so any movie recorded in 24 bit color played with a blank screen (and no errors). Video recorded at 16 bit worked fine, but that leaves out most movies I run across as well as any DVDs. I believe I could have gotten a picture by running X in 16 bit color, but I considered that undesirable. I did not have this issue with the previous driver release running with any 2.4.x kernels that I tried, so I am uncertain as to what combination of factors leads to this issue, but I heavily suspect the driver. I could try patching the previous driver release for a 2.6.x kernel, but I haven't felt like expending the effort at this point. I may try a newer release of the driver when one comes out. Another issue I have had with the binary driver is that foobillard always locks up as soon as a game is won. The source driver that comes with Xorg does not have this issue either.

P.S.
I didn't notice any glaring spelling errors in your post, but since you brought it up you may notice that this website has a spell check built in to the comment interface, so you can use that to double check your postings here anyway.

Personally, I like Pentium-M over Pentium4-M. It's engineered better. Not sure if you need a driver for linux to take advantage of the Pentim-M features... but hopefully it's pretty good just by itself.

I got a Dell Inspiron 600m. Not a bad laptop and I LOVE the keyboard. It's just like a regular keyboard with the Fkeys and the sort smaller. It has a good feel though. Other laptops like toshiba have a different layout. And since you are going to be programming a lot and maybe using tilde, you might like the more standard keyboard layout. Problems I've been having are that some of my LED's work intermittently (power, numlock, etc.) but the laptop as a whole is still functional.

My friend got a IBM laptop, not sure of the model number, but he got the Synaptics touchpad driver to work, apm works on it so he can sleep his laptop (I've never gotten ACPI to sleep properly), and his rubber feet are still there (I've lost all of mine). If this helps to find the model number, I believe his processor is a Pentium-M 1.5 or 1.7 ghz.

I'm not sure about digital sound for laptop. If you do have digital sound, you still need a decoder to make stuff work. Most laptops probably have crappy sound anyway. ATI's official drivers have made linux crash for me before. Also, if you have a lot of hard drive space, and you actually have the CDs (not good to convert mp3->ogg or any other format for that matter because you'll lose information) you can try FLAC. It's lossless, but it compresses 1/2

You can also get those USB external soundcard though, they should be supported by ALSA.

Anyway, good luck with your laptop

Not to thread hijack but bob22 have you gotten the memory card reader on the a70 to work under linux? I havent had any luck yet with my a70 I just recieved yesterday.

see my sig

i couldn't be happier with mine. everything works 100% perfect out of the box, and it's FAST. and if you screw it up, you have restore cds that work. plus the warranty is just as good as anybody elses.

and i avoided the microsoft tax

i HATE windows, i like using linux, but i HATE (even more) all the headaches that come with setup / configuration.

i knew in advance that buying a dell / compaq / other crappy american brand laptop from some lousy store and getting linux on it would be quite a pain in the ass. so rather than try to do it myself, (since i'm certainly NOT a linux guru (which means it would be done half assed if it even worked)), i figured it would be totally reasonable to pay PROFESSIONALS to do all of that for me.

and 2 months later, i'm still very glad i did.

www.laclinux.com/en/Laptop



they have great LINUX support, and lots of good harware to choose from. buying a toshiba designed for windoze doesn't make sense. buy a laptop that's designed and supported for what you want.

here's the specs on mine

LUCGM2 Centrino - $1449.00

* Pentium-M 1.7 GHz (2M L2 cache)
* 512M PC2700 SODIMM
* 40GB 4200rpm hard drive <-- i upgraded to a 40gb 7200 rpm for about $40
* 8x/24x10x24 DVD-ROM/CD-RW

Highlights:

* Supports Pentium-M CPU (1M cache)
* Supports PC2700 DDR SODIMM
* Intel Extreme 2 video
* 12.1" WXGA (1280x800) <-- looks great and performs pretty good too
* Onboard 10/100 NIC, 56k modem
* Optional onboard wireless NIC <-- i went for the intel 2200 pro pci wireless nic. it's ok ... if i could do it again i would have gotten a pcmia one that has a little bit better range.
* Onboard USB 2.0, firewire
* Integrated CF reader (SD, MMC, MS)
* 4.7lb (with CD, HDD, battery) very light!
* Long battery life about 2 hrs 45 minutes with the laptop-mode package installed .. would be even more with a slower hdd. i'm working on getting more out of it.
* Suspend to disk sleep this works!!!!!!!! press FN+f1 and the script they wrote puts it into hibernation cleanly. it's great for saving the battery if you're going to be away for a short (or long) amount of time


all said and done with the 7200 rpm hdd, wireless card, and an extra battery i paid $1550 shipped via ups 3 day express. they were 1 day late getting it out, so instead of shipping it ups ground for free, they gave me the 3 day upgrade. all in all, i think it's perfect for what i needed. (lots of java programming / web surfing etc).

you might want to take look at the 64bit model they have.

my advice to all here....never buy a hp/ Compaq laptop...if you do, like me, you will be looking for a new one before the end of the year!..Trust me on this, i have done it twice!

I had a Compaq Evo N160 and i was very happy with it, i sold it after 2 years & i got again a HP Pavilion zt3010us & it is working with no problems about 1 year.

maybe you had just bad luck with your HP/Compaq notebooks.