Looking for a new laptop
2000-04-24 16:23:24+00 by
Dan Lyke
5 comments
Okay, maybe one more comment: If I can't get this laptop thing sorted out, I've become too attached to portable computing to not replace it immediately. I'd rather not support the evil hegemony any more than necessary, so does anyone have suggestions for a laptop that runs Linux well, battery life and memory far more important than raw CPU power, if I can get it without having paid a Windows license fee so much the better, with a recent Debian distribution or without a hard disk so I can use the new big one I just got would totally rock. Either email or add 'em to the comments.
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#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:29:55+00 by:
John Anderson
I don't have any help on specifics, but there is a debian-laptop mailing list that might be able to help you out -- see http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe.
Good luck, and keep us posted.
john.
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:29:55+00 by:
whump
Linux.com has a listing of Linux ready/compatible/rated laptops.
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:29:56+00 by:
aron
I'm posting this from an IBM ThinkPad 240 running Red Hat 6.0. The only real difficulty was with installation, since the separate CDROM interfaces through a PCMCIA slot. I'm using a LinkSys 10/100 + 56K PCMCIA card to connect through my NAT box.
The nice thing about this laptop is that it's super tiny and has the ThinkPad joystick mouse control. I've also heard that the Sony 505 works quite well with Linux. (note my bias toward small laptops)
You should check out Ken Harker's Linux on Laptops page (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-laptop/)
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:29:56+00 by:
scm
http://elinux.com/ seems to have a decent selections of laptops that will run Linux. (I've never ordered from them, so I can't comment on their quality or service).
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:29:56+00 by:
Dan Lyke
I ended up at Office Despot and they had a couple o' refurb Compaq Presario 1247s for 3 digits. 400 MHz K6, with my 10gig HD in 'em a reasonable replacement.
Preliminary observations: The screen sucks, especially compared to the Fujitsu Milan it's replacing. A real BIOS would have been nice, but since all I've gotta do with it is boot the OS I really don't care. It's a big honker, feels solid, but heavy. Case is easy to get into (yes!). Need to do a little tweaking of power management stuff (hard disk keeps spinning down, I've got to make sure I have control over the timeout so I don't wear it out), but overall it seems an acceptable replacement, especially given how cheap it was. Just gotta do some tweaking of the power management code so that the shutdowns work the way I expect.