I'm in the market for my first laptop and would like to run a Linux / Windows system. As far as distros go I like playing around with Mandrake 9.1 and freebsd.
I was thinking about a dell 5100 or 5150 but see that they have problems with pcmcia card lockup and the network card is not supported I think.

Could I get a little help on what your choices would be for a laptop under $1500. I'm wanting to do graphics, flash and webdesign with this. And some recreational gaming and dvd watching. Buning cd's ect. I just don't want to get stuck with something I can only run a windows os on.

Thanks to all who want to help out here.

Hello,

I think for about $1500 (or abit more) you can buy the Samsung X10 with GeForce Go Graphics card, centrino processor finger print authentication. Thinnist centrino laptop are the Samsung X series, I have the X15 without the nVidia gfx card, having a bit of trouble getting ACPI to run in mdk 10.0 but I am getting there with a modified DSDT table, other than that its great!

Thank you for your input. I'll do some research on that model.

i would check out the ibm thinkpads. nice machines.

hi all, it's my first post here

hi Jakkin. I've just bought a samsung X15 also, but I cannot find any info on getting acpi to work. It would be very nice if you could share with me the way to do so, or even your working DSDT table :-) Is ACPI working mostly okey with default acpi in 2.6 kernel btw? or is it just not even work/boot?
send me private message if you'd like to. Thanks in advanced.

you may want to look into a toshiba as well. I had no problems getting linux up and running on mine. i found that even getting the ACPI working was a snap. There is also a great utils package to get all of those misc. buttons on the top of some of the models working.

WhatEVER you do...do NOT..I repeat do NOT buy a laptop with any video chip that mentions IGP.

I have a presario 2100 and while Gentoo runs VERY well on it, getting 3D to work on the thing has been...well "hassle" is an understatement. I'm still working on it.

I have an averatec, and every single aspect of it works, acpi, pcmcia, the touchpad, graphics........... It isn't a power machine but itworks flawlessly under SuSE 9.0 I am ver happy with it.

Also, stay away from the Dell C600 series. I have a c640 and it uses an ATI Radeon 7500 graphics chipset. It means that I'm stuck using the open source drivers rather than the proprietary ones...

Go with a laptop with an integrated nVidia chipset.

I'm no expert, but a very sharp friend of mine said that IBM's were the best, bar none. I would definitely suggest one of those or a Dell. In addition, I would strongly caution you against getting a Gateway, which is what I have. They seem to be very windows-optimized, and are a real pain for OSS.

I've got an Inspiron 5150, and I haven't had a problem with it yet. I've got everything workin, although I havent tried PCMCIA yet. I orded a wireless card this weekend, it'll be here in a few days, so I'll figure out if it works or not. I haven't heard people having problems with freezing from that. The only problem I've had is running the 2.6.x kernel this laptop (and most if not all of the others) run REALLY hot. I'm talking 60 to 80C. Games paused and stopped constantly, although it was probably due to overheating. Disabling speedstepping in the BIOS means I get speeds of 40 to 60. Unfortunately the system also runs at half speed (1500mhz) when you do that. I really haven't noticed a difference though. The 2.4.x kernel doesn't give problems :P. If you have questions feel free to send me a PM, I'm happy with this laptop!

the 5150s and related Dell laptops (5100, 1100) have known overheating issues related to a serious design flaw:
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportfor...t+5150&x=0&y=0

even if you're happy now, you might not be in 6 months when it starts shutting down after 2 minutes and randomly rebooting. i would never recommend one of those machines. ask any IT who deploys notebooks and they'll tell you Dells are POS with the highest failure rate of any manufacturer. maybe you lucked out and did not get one of the bad ones, but if it's still fairly new, maybe you can still return it for a refund and get another brand like IBM, toshiba, sager, etc. so you don't have to risk it.

I've got a three year warrenty so if I wanted to I could frisbee it out the window and get a new one . Yes I know a lot of people have had problems with the laptop; I researched a bunch of laptops before getting one. HP was my first choice; however, at the time none of them did 1600X1200 as a native lcd resolution with a good video card. Also at the time nobody had a good onboard graphics card, just the integrated 16MB cards or a radeon 9000. To this day my laptop still compares with the higher end ones . Yes this laptop was NOT designed to run full throttle 24/7.. the fan is a joke; however, like I said running it at 1.6ghz (speed stepping off) I notice no real performance drop and my laptop runs cool for a laptop. At this post:
gamma:~% cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM/temperature
temperature: 49 C

When gaming for a few hours and grabbing a temperature reading:
gamma:~% cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM/temperature
temperature: 61 C

Not too too bad. The reason the system is shutting off BTW is because once it reaches 90C it auto shuts off. This is good because higher and you're going to fry your computer, althouhg I'm sure a constant 90C would do some damage. Most computers have this saftey feature in the BIOS, nothing big.

BTW search for laptop overheating in any Linux forum and you'll find almost every laptop has that problem running at full speed. The i5150 is an affordable highly recommended laptop which is why it appears everyone has overheating problems.

If 300 people have an i5150 and 100 complain that looks like a lot of people
But if 30 people have a ______ and only 10 complain you're going to think it's a better laptop.

IBM is great for Linux btw, but bad for gaming

call me crazy, but I think I'm gonna get this one:

http://www.emachines.com/products/pr...Machines_M6809

I am flat out blown away by the specs. Its loaded! Previous emachines have had good compatibility reports on http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/emachines.html and I love the idea of an Athlon 64 3200+ with a radeon 9600 and a DVDRW for only $1549. Compare that with a loaded thinkpad T41 and its like half the price!

Looks REALLY good. Only problem I can notice is look at the native resolution.. 1280x800. If you run it at anything other than that things will be fuzzy and that's a weird resolution. That's why I like the i5150.. 1600x1200 native .