As to the laptop: both Best Buy and Office Depot have recently been selling a Compaq at $399 that has an NVidia 8200m chipset...very cool if you're at all into games :). It has 2gig RAM, 160gig HD, 15.4" screen size (1280x800), three USB ports, but lacks an expresscard slot. The WiFi chip is an Atheros 5007 series, it has an AMD dual-core chip that supports hardware virtualization (tested and working in VirtualBox 2.0.6 - you have to turn hardware virtualization ON in the BIOS).
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9027698&type=product&id=1218010578770 A friend just bought two of these. I installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid, had no problems AT ALL. I did have to blacklist the Atheros drivers and install a backported module pack to get the Ath5k project driver working...let me know if you need help with that. They should have included it in Intrepid but it didn't quite make cut-off. Works very well though. Overall I was very impressed. The lack of an Expresscard slot and the three USBs were the only flaws I could see. Oh, and no HDMI video port (no biggie to me). Build quality appeared more than decent. As to the serial port: run the "full tilt" edition of Virtualbox from the Sun repositories or downloaded if you use a non-Debian distro. This gives you USB pass-through. Should work great. Jim --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
