Austad, Jay writes:
 > 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.

I know your mileage varies, but I found there were just too many times
I might have to have bona fide M$ compatibility, and found that the
Apples were just too expensive.  OTOH, with real Unix, you don't have
to install cygwin, which has a really crummy install IMNSHO.

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

I found that this way of progressing was pretty painful.  What I
really wanted to do was filter the list of laptops by current
availability (a lot of those listed there are discontinued), then by
degree of suitability for linux.  

With that information, I would have zeroed in on my laptop much more
quickly.  As it stood, I spent a lot of time chasing down blind alleys
(e.g., modern Toshibas seem very hard to get to work with Linux).

oh, well :-(  I'm afraid I don't have the available hours to construct
such a web site.

R

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