I've had some problems in the past with wifi hardware. I had one laptop (Compaq Evo N600c) where the wifi driver worked, but is not maintained and only available from svn (orinoco_usb). My newest laptop that I got last week (Dell D620) is too new for the driver to have been well tested (ipw3945) and I'm only getting about 20K/sec throughput (vs my normal 180K/sec). Its a good laptop other than this one issue - and since the driver is maintained by Intel directly I imagine that it won't be too long before this is fixed. Needless to say, one thing I would recommend is finding a laptop with wireless hardware that has a driver that's well tested and well supported. You might be better off just buying from a place that pre-installs Linux. http://www.pcsforeveryone.com has a Thinkmate Z33A that they will install Fedora Core 5 or Suse 10 on for no extra charge. Also http://linuxcertified.com/linux_laptops.html has some custom built Linux notebooks and offer a variety of distro choices. -Jared On 8/11/06, Stephen C. Daukas <scd@daukas.com> wrote:
I forgot to bring this up at the cookout last night...
I have decided to purchase a new laptop (a first for me - always used older equipment) and was wondering if anyone had recommendations for a model that plays well with Linux. I'm not interested in a laptop with the latest whiz-bang features, just the basics of wireless networking, ability to play/burn CDs/DVDs, enough horsepower & disk to run forecasting models, GIS, database, etc., and a battery that will last for several hours. (My guess is any laptop these days would be sufficient.) I want to avoid having to add drivers or other support for some whiz-bang hardware when something "vanilla" would work just as well for me, and I would prefer a distro that supports the various standard laptop features (e.g., power management) and typical peripherals like DVDs/movies, Burning CDs, etc., "out of the box". Again, this is probably a non-issue, but there could be a laptop using hardware known to be problematic (remember "winmodems"?)...
I use several apps that only run on windows (probably forever), so another first for me will be dual-boot. I have done this before on others' systems, but I mention this just in case there is a awareness of issues with certain laptop models.
Anyway, thanks in advance for your help!
Steve _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug