My Toshiba 1955-S801 has ran RedHat 8/9, SuSE 8.2 and Gentoo 1.4. I have had no problems. I don't know if the modem works, haven't tried it but that is the only thing left for me to mess with. After a while I have this thing working cherry, most of the time was spent familiarizing myself with Gentoo, however. The only thing I have done was upgrade kernel to 2.6 stable. I use it for video editing/capture from my Sony minidv camera (firewire) and my Sony digital camera (USB). I have built in Atheros minipci wireless that can run on 802.11a/b/g. The reason I love this laptop is because it is a "desktop replacement" model that runs a full powered desktop P4 chip. This thing smokes and has never had a problem running any app. The MainActor software runs great. A friend of mine bought the P25 series Toshiba and it works even better than mine. Of all the laptops I've had I recommend the Toshiba over everything else. I've seen some people running Fujitsus with FreeBSD and they worked well, also.

I'm running Fedora Core 1 on a Dell 2650
1.6 Ghz
Pentium Celeron
GeForce2Go
i810/ac97 sound
Conexant modem

I had to go into /boot/grub/grub.conf and add acpi=on in the options, shows when the battery is being used, when the laptop is plugged in, when charging, power button shuts down the laptop as if you issued the command shutdown -h now, has CPU throttling haven't investigated this further yet to ensure it is working but it shows up under /proc/acpi. I then had to go into [b]/lib/modules/kernel-2.4*/kernel/drivers/acpi and delete the Toshiba module to get rid of the error loading Toshiba.o or something along those lines. Upon first boot up right clicked on the GNOME panel added Utility-->battery monitor, this brought up your battery monitor. Then of course as you can gather from the forum installed the NVIDIA driver. So far I haven't had any problems, and I haven't looked back at putting windows on my Laptop

I have an IBM Thinkpad 600. I'm still quite new to linux and haven't got the sound or modem working yet, but from a default installation of Mandrake the GUI worked fine. Certain things are a bit slow under Mandrake 9.1, but it all worked fine under 9.0, so i guess some settings need tweaking. I don't really like the too user friendly style of Mandrake and am hoping to change to slackware soon. I run Windows 98SE as the main operating system, but only because Linux isn't set up properly yet. I am hoping to only use windows under very rare circumstances, but it will depend how much I get working under Linux. I run Linux because it is open source and isn't made by microsoft- join the rebellion!

I have used T600E, T21 and am using T30 now. All of these work great with Linux except the winmodem. Regarding the video performances you better conisider another model or make because T30 has only 16MB of video memory. Sound quality, play back, of thinkpad, in my opinion, is not good. I am not sure about the audio recording quality though. If you do a lot of video editing you may want a lot of system memory too, but T30 supports only 1GB memory. I don't know about how much memory is supported by other models. While I am using my laptop for photo editing I feel it is a bit slow although it is powered by 1.8Ghz CPU and 1GB memory.

My biggest question is how you are planning on doing video production on a linux laptop? Or are you planning on doing a dual boot? I have looked around for a video editor for linux, and haven't come up w/ anything very impressive yet (if anyone knows of anything that works well LET ME KNOW!)...

Now before someone makes me eat my own words--I will make myself eat my own words:

http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3

I have no idea how it feels to use--but by the way they talk about it--it should be pretty good. I think I am gonna try it out pretty soon.

Also--for audio, I know there is a fairly good prog called "audacity"

I talked to a guy that uses it. He said it owns! I want to set it up, but no time or machines to justify it...

Has anyone had any experience with this particular Sony Vaio model? The Sony site had more details but I cant seem to find the page I was on earlier. I heard that Linux doesnt work with Centrino.

I can appreciate the frustration that Morelli displays in his/her post, but I have to disagree with the conclusion that running Linux on a laptop is too much of a pain. While I won't sit here and say that every feature on my laptop ran perfectly right after the install, usually a simple "divide and conquer" attitude can solve a lot of these problems. Sometimes the problems take a long time to solve, sometimes a short time. It's also a matter of how familiar you are with the distro of Linux you are installing. Each one will have a slightly different look and feel, even if they are running the same underlying GUI (such as KDE or GNOME). So doing the same process in two different distros could be quite different.

The first distro I ever installed on my laptop was SuSE 8.2. Most of the stuff on my laptop worked. My wireless PCMCIA card, my USB Cruzer, my 3D accelerator function on my video card didn't. It took me a while to figure these things out. But I did. Like anything else, it just takes a little patience, some time, and access to a good search engine or two.

One of the things I've found with most of my endeavors in Linux is that usually all of the information needed to solve the problem is out on the web. Where things get hairy is that a comprehensive guide to solving your specific problem never seems to be in exactly one location. For instance, to get printing working wirelessly from my laptop, I discovered from various websites that there were four steps I needed to go through. What I needed to figure out, however, was that there were four steps and the order in which I needed to execute them. Truth be told, I finally acquired this information after about 8 hours of surfing and testing.

I've currently got Slack 9.1 running on my Dell Inspiron 8200 and I love it. Not because it was easy to install (which it was) and configure (which other than XFree, it was), but because it stays out of my way until I need it and then I have a lot of flexibility on exactly how I want to change my environment around. YMMV.

I would agree with the person who posted the www.linux-on-laptops.com website link. That site helped me out immensely. And if you haven't purchased your particular laptop yet, that may give you a good "heads up" of what to expect when you finally do manage to install a distro of Linux.

Too much of a pain ? That does not sound right. What is too much of a pain for me is windows and that is why I have been using linux at home, at work and at my laptop during the last five years.

The last installation was Knoppix 3.4 on my Compaq Presario 700 laptop and my desktop. The results ? Well, I wasn't expecting the firewire port to work without having to do anything. I wrote a quick article on my blog about it:

http://julian.coccia.com/article-63.html

I am using an older IBM thinkpad 380z, flawless install, the only thing i had to go in manually and fix was the sound card, took about 15 min searching here to discover the howto, usb works as well as my docking station (4 PCMCIA slots!!!) I use a IR mouse, 4 port usb hub, usb 10-key pad, usb jumpdrive and usb light with no additional setup except for adding lines to my XF86Config file to use both the onboard touchpoint and external usb mouse. The only gripe i have is that it only has one ps/2 port on the back, and it is only for a mouse, wish it was a keyboard port, but my docking station has two ps/2 ports.

I have a Dell Latitude CSX that works flawlessly. Earlier versions of Slackware I tended to build my own kernel, but on upgrading to Slackware 10 I found everything worked flawlessly on first boot and didn't touch it. Even suspend/resume, which most people have complained about. General rule of thumb I have found is older notebooks work a bit better as there has been more time for the kernel to change to support the hardware. 2.6 seems to have made a reasonable difference to most newer notebooks as well

Just today I installed FreeBSD 5.2.1 on my Acer Travelmate 2000 (doesn't appear on any notebook compatability lists), it works very well! Touch pad works, if I have USB mouse plugged in like I do at my desk, I can use both at once, the default X confiuration (XFree86 -configure) generated config file sets it to the max resolution and everything works fine. All I have to do is get the "wheel" buttons working, and everything so far works. I'm getting an addon wifi pcmcia card soon so we will see how well that works..

(I also havnt managed to get the ATI Radeon 9000 working, but im unsure if there are specific drivers for freebsd, none appear in ports)

I know I installed Slack on my Dell 2650.
It worked really well except for a few little problems/manual fixes (setting up the touchpad and the USB mouse, and finding the nVidia drivers)
But I did run into trouble with the sound-it wouldn't play right most of the time. It would crackle when starting X (KDE), listening to music, etc.

Actually, if anyone has any ideas about how to fix that, it'd be awesome.


P4
1.60 GHz
256 Ram

Linux is a double edged sword, if everything works well you feel like you've found your new best friend, if something goes wrong or doesn't work, people cry and go back to windows.

I'd recommend when buying a new computer,desktop or laptop, to do a serious amount of research and if you plan on running linux, do even more research. If you do your homework hopefully everything will work out for the best.

I was alittle worried about the whole linux on a laptop thing, but so far it's worked far better then my desktop (sata victim #3023). Most of my trouble so far has come just from inexperiance with linux (I used to use it years ago, turns out you forget alot). So I'd recommend getting familar with the distro you plan to use in advance, if you have that option. I'm running slackware 10, and it seems to work fine, KDE runs but is not exactly blazingly fast (600mhz, 128mb ram) so I switched to fluxbox, which looks nice and is fast and functional. I haven't gotten everything to work yet, still working on suspend and resume amoung other issues, but if you expect linux to work without alittle elbow grease, I honestly think your using the wrong os.