Hi,

I have scraped enough money together for a second hand laptop and I have only 2 criteria really: it must have 1 gig RAM and it must run slackware 12 without too much futzing around.

Can anybody speak of their own experiences with laptops and slackware 12? I am looking at Dell Latitude systems at the moment as I have used a few of these with windows and they were good solid machines.

Thanks for any advice,

Andrew

i would recommend looking at something that runs AMD, its not the processor but the other parts of the laptop that seem more "linux friendly" and requires less tweaking. i currently have a HP pavilion zv6000. 1.8ghz semperon, 768 ram (128 is for onboard ati). and the only problem/configurnig i had to do with it was the Broadcom wifi chip.

I just got a Thinkpad T21. They seem to have good chipset driver support.

I'm on my fourth Latitude running Slackware. It's a fine choice. I also have a ThinkPad running Slack. The ATI driver is crap compared to the nVIDIA driver (my D800 has an nVIDIA GPU). The Intel 3945 in the ThinkPad works pretty well, but so does the Broadcom card in the Dell.

Either would be decent choices. Avoid HP.

I have a Toshiba Satellite A680 (pretty old - 4 years) and slackware 12 runs smoothly on it.

+1 for Thinkpad - running Slackware on these (600E, T23, R51 and now T61p) for almost 10 years was great experience for me.

Anything for or against Thinkpad 60(p)/61(p)?
Was just going to buy it and noticed this thread

Thinkpads are good. Even back to the old X20's, Slackware runs just fine with them. You need the odd module for this or that (usually modems, and who uses those nowadays) but they are very compatible. Plus, I love the build quality and the features (Trackpoint, trackpad, external mouse, let the user use what he wants...).

I was actually looking at the modern Lenovo Thinkpad's too... there is one particular cheap model that seems to have everything. I think it was the 60's. Anyway, if you need a *Thinkpad* on Linux, check out ThinkWiki to check on it's compatibility etc. It's an invaluable resources for tweaking all the internal settings for binary modules, power settings etc.

There are also some specific kernel modules for dealing with the blue fn buttons, so make sure you check those out too.

Mine is Acer Travelmate and no problem here since 10.1 (using -Current)

My T61i runs Slackware 12. Only the Wifi needs the intel drivers....

Mine latest is T61p, awesome machine and works great with Slackware. As mentioned above, WiFi driver has to be installed manually (but the procedure is dead simple; furthermore as of couple days ago, 2.6.24.3 kernel is delivered through slackware-current, having this driver built-in). NVIDIA driver has to be installed manually too, but the installer is provided, and worked great for me (furthermore, NVIDIA drivers are, in my experience, rock solid). Also, again as mentioned above, some ACPI configuration is needed for Fn buttons to work. The rest of the stuff (audio, Ethernet, Bluetooth, etc.) works great. Even the modem works, using Linuxant driver. If you need specific info - feel free to ask; more details regarding hardware support could be also found at ThinkWiki pages. So, overall - in my experience, if one could afford it (and these are not that costly after all), it is the great machine to run Slackware.

Okay, so how many external packages you installed to get T61p fully working? I mean those, that are not included in slackware-current.
Let me start:
- NVIDIA drivers
- driver for a built-in modem

I have very few problems with my Acer Aspire 5100. All it needs is the append="idle=poll" lilo option, and the synaptics and madwifi drivers from Slackbuilds.org

All that's missing is easy drivers for the built in web-cam, microphone, and SD/MMC card reader (All three detected as USB devices)

Yes, these 2 drivers have to be installed manually. As a matter of fact, I'm not using modem at all (and I guess these days neither do most of people), but it happened that it is based on the same chip as my previous R51 machine, so I tried the driver anyway, and it worked fine (unfortunately, even today modems often could not be made to work on many laptops). One could get maybe even without installing NVIDIA drivers, if 3D acceleration not needed (I need it, I'm GPGPU/CUDA programmer); on the other side, if you are in business for serious 3D performance, you'll have to install driver by yourself for any other laptop/desktop machine - there are still no open-source drivers for high-end graphics hardware. There is a SlackBuild for NVIDIA driver over at SlackBuilds.org, so maybe even installation of this driver could be streamlined somewhat, although as I mentioned above NVIDIA drivers are rather easy to install.

Everything else (that I'm using - for example, my machine is custom ordered without fingerprint reader, etc.) works fine with stock Slackware installation, of course with appropriate settings in corresponding config files.