Hello

I Am Going to buy a New Laptop and could not stand to pay all that money for something that dose not work (windows) so i want to run linux on my laptop prob slackware am a newbie to linux but can genarly make anthing work. i have found a company that will sell me a laptop with no opperationg system on it and the guy in the shop says linux should run on it but its a big commmitment €1500. the things that are worring me are the touchpad, modem, cd-rw and drivers in genarle, dose linux run on your laptops well and did it take alot to configer i realy want to run linux on my laptop but would i be better to get a deasktop that i could build myself that i know everthing would work, but i could do with the convenence of a laptop.

Thanks
Dave

It might help people to answer well if you could provide the type of hardware that is going to come with the laptop. I mean, the manufactures of various parts. I have a Sony Vaio (PCG-GRZ630) and Slackware runs really well on it. I never bothered to get the modem working, but other than that, everything else works fine. With Slack 10.0, most of the things were automatically configured, including the graphics card.

linux hardware support is very good these days. unless your new laptop has some very obscure hardware, your chances are very good.

it depends on the details though, so you might want to add a description of the components in the laptop you plan to buy, so we can comment on details..

the probably most important thing is the graphics card, and wether it will work with 3d-accelleration-- nvidia seems to have the best linux support with their binary drivers, i use ati's binary drivers with some trouble but general success. of course, good support from open-source drivers would be preferable to any "official" but binary drivers, but i am unaware as for which adapters this would apply.

internal laptop modems (softmodems, usually) are still a little troublesome to setup. CDRW should be no problem, just as the touchpad. YMMV.

There's a laptop section in the HCL.

Good place to start IMO.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php?cat=507

Also, go to http://linux-laptop.net/ and see how other people have gotten along with the various models. My Toshiba Satellite Pro A10 runs Mdk 10, Slackware 10, SuSE 9.1 and others with few problems - the soundcard is the only thing I have to reconfigure (this is just to get the system up and running, as with all distros I then fiddle around with everything else )

hp is making a laptop with suse already installed, check hp's site for details, or e-week's linux news section

Suse 9.1 runs great on my Dell Inspiron 8000 with only some minor hiccups (volume buttons don't work). But touchpad and CDRW were detected automatically.

As a newbie (like myself) you might want to try a distro the maximum amount of hardware setup for you, so you can now that if something doesn't work you can probably rule out your configuration being the problem. I tried Mandrake 10 first -- which was OK but was unable to setup my wireless card automatically. SuSe did this without a hitch.