I recently bought a Systemax laptop (www.globalcomputer.com) because I
was dissatisfied with most of the major-brand laptops on the market.
Nevertheless, even this computer isn't exactly a dream linux machine.
A
couple of things to consider:
a. does the laptop feature intel centrino technology? mine does, but
there's no support for the intel minipci wireless card in linux as of
yet. also, speedstep for the pentium-m doesn't seem to be supported in
the 2.4.2* kernels, although I hear that it is in the 2.6.* series.
also, the 2.4.* kernels don't seem to recognize my cpu cache
(/proc/cpuinfo reports cache size: 0 KB), although again I hear the
2.6.* kernels do. I haven't tried it yet; I don't know.
Been using 2.6 (and 2.5) since the purchase of my gateway notebook. It works great (except test6), give it a whirl if you have the chance. I also had speedstep ("intel enhanced speedstep") working when I had tried early 2.4.22_pre releases of ac-sources too (ac has newer acpi patches and stuff, or at least did at the time).
The wireless is a writeoff, unfortunately. I wish it worked, as the builtin card has a nice antenna soldered on that (i assume) runs around the unit's base. Excellent signal strength (in another OS) compared to my linksys card I bought. It is also supposed to be much lower power, but I havent really done any comparisons with the linksys card in windows (and I dont think a centrino on windows, linksys on linux is a valid comparison... for what it's worth, with the cpu clocked to 600mhz, my battery life is slightly better in linux).
If i get time/money and dont want to void my warranty by opening the minipci access door on my laptop (theres a part of that I dont understand), I'm going to see if I can get my hands on a cisco airo minipci card, and connect the antenna leads. mmmm, integrated wireless.
b. other acpi support, which can be dependent on your bios. call technical support as ask them about this. will your laptop be able to sleep and wake up, suspend, hibernate? mine does, but I could never get this to work on my old Dell laptop.
If you are buying a new laptop without ACPI support, theres something wrong. :)
c. video card. i know lots of people report problems with ATI mobility
cards, so you may have to resort to framebuffer if you can't get a
driver to add hardware acceleration. perhaps i'm lucky, my ATI card
seems to be working fine with X at the moment.
The main problem at the moment is the Radeon IGP (aka "radeon mobility", note no number). I've got a radeon 7500 mobility and it works great with dri. Radeon IGP also kinda works now (theres development), but you have to add that driver yourself (i believe it is patches to the current radeon driver, so it should be fairly easy to throw into an ebuild for X).
I would look at the laptops made by some of the smaller brands, youu'll likely find a cheaper machine that works just about as well as any other laptop out there as far as linux support goes. It depends whats most important to you. I chose a cheap, light notebook that has slight linux compatibility problems, but I knew this going into it, and I don't regret anything. Whatever works for you.
other laptop users, what did i leave out?
I think you hit the nail on the head with "whatever works for you". I could drone on all day about what I think is important in a laptop, and somebody else could do the same and have entirely different points. I dont even use suspend or hibernate states, but to some this is needed and very important.
Although, I do reccommend more than a 30 gig drive if you are going to have multiple operating systems installed. I've found that I've pretty much filled my 30G (split down the middle for windows xp and gentoo). Granted, I have a few games installed, though.
--
Chris I
Real computer scientists don't comment their code. The identifiers are so long they can't afford the disk space.
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