B4 u buy, check to see if others have had problems with your model laptop: http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/
Grab IRQ information and vendors for things like ethernet cards and model numbers from windows if you have it. Winmodem are a notorious problem - especially with laptops. Grpahics card support is getting better in XFree86 v4, but can still be an issue (especially for 3d support) again, check the linux laptops page. I have and like My Dell laptop, and my older IBM ThinkPad. The ThinkPad (eventually) had everything supported. (No built-in modem, and this was a 6 year old paperweight.) My Newer Dell is a big brick-like thing, but the only thing not supported in Linux is the WinModem. (Tis ok since I have a 3com combo ethernet and modem in one.) If you want to buy PCMCIA cards, check to see if the card is supported: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pcmcia-cs/pcmcia-cs-3.2.3.tar.gz?use_mirror=easynews (Check the file supported cards (if strill there) to see what is supported.) There are many more thoughts and suggestions on laptops and linux. The above covers many ideas I would have "off the top." Mark K. Kim said: > I installed, with permission, Linux on the company laptop (which I'm > using now) that already had Windows XP installed; it's a dual-boot. > It's an HP Pavilion XF255 we purchased from Costco. Works great! > > I used a partitioning software to partition NTFS, then installed > Mandrake 8.2. I think everything got autodetected nicely, though due to > various work needs I'm using mostly the Windows side. > > As a sidenote, installing Putty, Cygwin, and DJGPP sweetened up the XP > really nicely. And I got around the lack of the start.exe program by > aliasing `start` to `cmd /c start`. Very nice. > > -Mark > > > On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Larry Ozeran wrote: > >> Hi all -- >> >> I want to create a demonstration system for speech recognition >> (dictation) and open source medical office software. I need Dragon >> Dictate, which requires Windows 2000 or XP, more than 256 MB RAM, and >> at least 800 Mhz CPU. (ViaVoice for Linux is simply inadequate.) What >> I have read recently suggests Linux and XP can coexist peacefully. >> However, I seem to recall hearing that there can be problems dual >> booting with Windows XP, e.g. XP must be installed first. Does anyone >> know of any gotchas to be aware of when deciding which laptop to buy? >> >> Thanks. >> >> -- Larry >> >> _______________________________________________ >> vox-tech mailing list >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech >> > > -- > Mark K. Kim > http://www.cbreak.org/ > PGP key available upon request. > > _______________________________________________ > vox-tech mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech