Hi. am about to buy a new laptop and install linux for the first time. I was thinking of buying a eurosimm laptop 2.0ghz. on the company web page it says you can't use win 98 blah blah blah but you can use linux. however that computer comes with the sis650 chipset and looking at some posts here and eslewhere it seems people have had problems. so will linux work properly on ths laptop? I mainly ant to type and go on the internet but i don't want to be excluded from something a windows user could do. if sis650 is a no go what chipsets should i be looking outfor?

many thanks

What I have learned is that almost nothing is not supported (only that centrino wireless card...).
But it is not so easy to make everything work, I have a dell 500m, I know about what I am talking.

I agree with shadowhunter... many things will work, but getting everything to work is proving to be quite difficult...

Hmmm, but isn't GETTING things to work half the fun???

I'm new(ish) to Linux too, I've been lucky so far in I've installed Mandrake 9.1 on my old notebook (HP OmniBook XE2 - 600MHz PIII, 256M RAM and with a new, faster, bigger hard disk installed - playing safe so I can get back the Win98 with a lot of old stuff, just in case I need it).

I've just tried KNOPPIX off of a magazine cover DVD on this and my new Fujitsu-Siemens and everything worked fine on bth (excepting WinModems).

I don't suppose your local computer store would be too happy with you booting their demo machines with KNOPPIX (safe tho' it would be) but you could try. I believe it has an install option as well so it should be easy to get a bootable copy of Debian onto the machine to get started.