Re: Which laptops have you had success installing Linux on?

From: 4seasonphoto (four_season_photo_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/17/03 

Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 20:26:21 -0600

If I had a chance to do it over again, I might pay extra and buy a
notebook that was built a bit sturdier than my Toshiba Satellite
1115-S103; not a bad machine overall, it's card eject buttons are easy
to break, and so are the hinged doors which cover the card slots.

I don't know if RH9 includes tools to resize an NTFS partition, but ASP
Linux did, so that's what I used to do the disk setup. Once that was
accomplished, I installed Debian. At the time, the partition resizing
feature was still a bit iffy but it worked fine on a new and
unfragmented XP partition.

I'd expect to run into some problems with any very new notebook, as
drivers don't always exist for various subsystems. Pretty much
everything is working on my Toshiba, including sound, ACPI, DVD,
ethernet, WiFi, etc, but ACPI under Linux is still immature, and I had
to compile a custom kernel to get PC card support. I've just downloaded
the source code for kernel 2.6-pre1 and hope that'll simplify matters.

Recently, I acquired an old P150MMX NEC Versa 2650CDT: It runs Debian
just fine with a stock 2.4.18 kernel, and X gave me no problems at all.

Leonard Evens wrote:
> I may be in the market for a laptop. Unfortunately I will have to keep
> Windows on it, but I also want to install RedHat 9. I don't want to
> have a lot of trouble resizing Windows or getting X to work. Also, I
> want it to cost as little as possible, although I will spring for more
> memory, a floppy, and a CD-RW drive. Wieght is probably not a major
> concern.
>
> Any information on recent laptops you've had success with would be
> appreciated.
>