I've never liked Dell laptops.  They seem clunky, and my new c610 that I got
from work has 384M of ram and a P4 1.7ghz, and it's still dog slow.  I'm
pretty sure it's because Dell puts abysmally slow hard drives in their
laptops.  Linux is kind of a pain to get working correctly on almost all of
the Dell's I've put it on.  Still not completely working right on my current
one, can't get it to work right when docking and undocking.

Sony...  Nice, but if you drop them once, they are history.  I lost 3 of
them this way, and they just fell off my lap, so they didn't go far.  Linux
was annoying to install because the ones I had shared memory between video
and sound.  

The HP Omnibook 600 is a sweet little thin notebook.  Feels sturdy, and is
very nicely designed.  Except I'm not sure if they make it anymore.  My
roomie had linux on his, I didn't hear him complain.

I really like some of the new toshiba notebooks, although some of them try
to look like an Aiwa stereo or a Pontiac.  Some of their smaller ones are
very nice though.  They seem study, and most models look nice.  Linux played
nicely with the old ones, not sure about the new ones.

If I was going to buy a new laptop, I'd probably just get the new 12"
PowerBook.  It has every feature under the sun, runs a Unix variant, and
just makes me happy in general.  You can run linux on it also if you really
decide you need to.  However, I haven't found a reason to with my iBook, all
of my linux apps compile just fine on it.

Figure out what you might want, and then check it out on the linux laptops
database.
http://www.linux-laptop.net/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Hicks [mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 11:00 AM
> To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> Subject: Re: [TCLUG] Laptop recommendations
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 06:53, Jim Crumley wrote:
> > Does anyone have any recommendation for laptops to use with
> > Linux?
> 
> I sometimes hate to say it, but take a look at Dell.  Their Inspiron
> line is usually fairly reasonably priced, and they offer a lot of what
> you're looking for.  They can be pretty heavy, but you 
> usually get both
> a trackpad and a trackpoint.  They also offer some of the
> highest-resolution displays you can get on a laptop.  It's 
> been possible
> to get their modems working in the past, though I don't know 
> what things
> are like these days.
> 
> You may want to pick your video card carefully.  As I recall, 
> the nVidia
> cards tend to get unhappy when the system tries to sleep (and it's
> impossible to fix, since nVidia loves binary drivers), so I've always
> seen it best to get an ATI card, but I don't know if that's true these
> days.  There's always the fallback option of using VESA drivers, but
> they're slow (not too bad when your processor speed is in the 
> gigahertz,
> but still slow).  I had to do that for a few months while the XFree86
> folks built in support for the card I had (an ATI one).
> 
> -- 
>  _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   Linux Geeks: 
> Smart. Single.
> / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   Sexy. Well, 2 out of 3
> \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)  ain't bad.
> [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | 
> mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
> 

_______________________________________________
TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list