On Sun, 25 Apr 1999, Will Lowe wrote: > I'm looking at buying a pair of laptops which will need to dual-boot > Windows and Debian. > > I'm not concerned that they be Pentium IV 600 Ghz machines or be huge > number-crunchers, but I would like them to run X enough that I can use > emacs and font-lock mode, netscape (with something more that 256 colors) > ... the standard stuff. > > 1) Are there laptops which aren't compatible with linux and Debian? > > 2) I understand that laptop video chipsets are wacky. Which ones work? > > 3) Are there other compatability issues I should be watching for? I've > never touched anything with a PCMCIA card in it ... >
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-laptop/ has tons o' info. You just need to check the PCMCIA drivers list before getting a PCMCIA card - some of them (notably Linksys) even say "Linux compatible" on the box though. I love my little Panasonic CF-M32 subnotebook. It works great, except for the sound card but that's pretty typical on desktops too. Using the XFree Neomagic X server which is available on www.xfree86.org (copy the server binary over the one in the latest Debian package, until the latest X gets into the official package). Use the "tecra" boot disks to install. The advantage to this little Panasonic is that it seems to be replaced by a newer CF-M33 so it's only about $850 on the street. Kicks much ass. Small keyboard though. :-) Havoc