<quote who="Stephen C. Daukas">
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.
Lenovo seems like a natural choice because they sell laptops with Linux pre-installed. For those looking at used laptops (Stephen says he's buying new), I installed Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 8200 recently. It was painless, and everything seems to work, including the PCMCIA 802.11G card. -- Rich