Laptops and Linux
Anyway: Linux Laptops! Yay! I am currently running Linux on 2 laptops,
and I have set up 3 different models. The verdict? You can nearly always
get everything to work with some tweaking. The things you need are:
1) DETAILED tech specs...Dell is a good candidate for this, Sharp is the
worst
2) Good BIOS support...it really streamlines things to be able to set some
things to non-PnP, particularly COM ports. Get a laptop that's NT-approved.
3) Your own kernel. Yeah, if you don't know how to recompile the kernel,
suck it up an learn
Specific comments:
My least favorite brand of laptop is Toshiba, and my second least is Compaq.
Sorry, but hey, gotta be honest. ;) The reason Toshiba gets the worst,
though, is that they have a history of being slightly nonstandard, broken,
or filled with undocumented "features" (in the sense of "bugs") in the BIOS.
I mean, for verification of this, just look at make menuconfig; they sure do
have a lot of fixes for thier stuff, and for every fix there are a few
unfixables.
In essence, though, all the things you mentioned are just kernel options you
turn on, and if your lap has standard-looking interfaces for everything
you're good to go. Particularly the ATI graphics cards and ESS Maestro
sound cards seem to be easy to get running, and the NeoMagics are the worst.
One laptop actually crashed the hard disk every time you tried to activate
sound...go figure.
I currently run linux on a Dell Latitude C600, and everything was perfect,
no complaints, right out of the box. It can be done!
--adam b.
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