Jim Crumley writes: > Does anyone have any recommendation for laptops to use with > Linux? I've been running Mandrake 8.2/9.0/9.1 on a Compaq Presario 2710us for close to a year now. I'm no expert on what a good laptop brand would be, but this one has been excellent. 1.13Ghz P3, Built in 10/100 lan, 512M ram, Swappable CDRW/Floppy/Weightless storage, Battery life is good at 3-4 hours (sometimes more), 20 gig hard drive, 2 USB ports, 1 Firewire, S-Video, External Monitor, 1 PCMCIA Slot, Parallel Port, and 1 Mouse/Keyboard port. I've never used the built in winmodem, but I've heard that the support for it is only an rpm away. The mouse is a 2 button touchpad with a 4 way directional pad (so far I only have up/down working as a scroll). Other laptops I've used have given me problems with the keyboard being "squished" to fit on them, but this one wasn't a problem. It is also running ACPI so untill Mandrake 9.1 I didn't have soft-power-down or the ability to monitor the battery, or shut off the screen, but now all these work great along with a cpu temp monitor. A few cons I have for this laptop though: Came with Windows XP, I didn't know Linux at the time (this laptop is my first Linux machine) so I tried to get rid of XP with 98/ME/2k to no avail, so I figured I'd rather switch than get stuck with XP, hopefully this is the last Windows tax I'll ever pay for. Intel sound card isn't the best, doesn't like rates lower than 44kHz. The ATI Radeon Mobility card has it's problems, but so far with XFree86 4.3 it's been wonderful. And upgrades are expensive, +$450 for the 40gig HD if you wanted it, and the swap bay supports a second battery (+$300), both are awesome features to have, but I only got so much blood to sell. :P But I can't imagine any other upgrades this would ever need that couldn't be done through pcmcia or firewire/usb. Thats my experience with this laptop. I highly recommend it now that the acpi and Radeon support is as good as it is. -- Chris Frederick <cdf123 at cdf123.com> _______________________________________________ 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