Re: buying a new laptop
Shao Zhang <shao@linuxfreak.com> writes:
> Hi,
> I am in a process of buying a new laptop. I cannot really afford
> any expensive ones (above AUS$3000), yet a powerfull one. I know
> my requirements are contradicting to each other.
>
> A thinkpad will be ideal for me, but they are just so expensive.
> I happen to find out this site
> http://www.iedirect.com/default.asp
>
> Their laptop is so much cheaper compare to others, but I am a
> bit worried if it will run on Linux.
>
> Has anyone else bought any laptops from this site? Could someone
> recommend what/where to buy new laptops for linux?
I just bought a Thinkpad 240 from www.elinux.com. Their price was US$1069,
which was almost US$100 less than the best price on Pricewatch. The basic
machine is a 300 MHz Celeron with 64 megs and a 6.4 G HD. I added 64 megs,
a larger battery , a network card and a case and it still came out less
than US$1500.
They have a web page at http://www.elinux.com. I was not comfortable with
their secure order page. I spent a while on the phone with a guy named
Todd. He went out of his way to find answers to my questions. We had a
misunderstanding on the network card and he took care of it promptly. FWIW
their phone number is 1-877-395-4689. Todd's extension is 4154. Sorry if
this sounds like a commercial. I have no affiliation with them other than
as a satisfied customer.
The 240 came with Win98 on a 2 G partition. The remaining 4+ G partition
was totally empty. I need M$ at work, so I decided to keep the Win98
partition and install SuSE 6.3 on the rest. The process has not been
totally painless. I had planned to install via nfs from this box, but I
couldn't get networking up to my satisfaction. I have since tweaked the
pcmcia configuration and it's much better though still not perfect.
I copied the basic system files into the Win98 partition, then used SuSE's
'Install from a reachable partition' process to install the base system
from there. Then I booted the base system and continued the installation
via ftp from this box. All of that was more complicated and took longer
than it probably should have. I had never messed with pcmcia before.
I just got the system fully installed last night. I'm still booting from
DOS via loadlin. Today I plan to build a kernel with APM support and I may
install lilo. X works fine at 800x600 using the SVGA server. I got a
XF86Config file that worked out of the box from
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~peetz/thinkpad.html.
All I had to do was make a symlink from /varX11R6/bin/X to the SVGA server,
and a symlink from /dev/mouse to /dev/psaux, and it came up just fine.
Sound doesn't work, but I haven't had time to even look at that yet.
Anyway so far I'm happy with the Thinkpad 240. It's not the biggest or
fastest, but I think it's a pretty good value for the money. I put SuSE on
it because that's what I have here. The Linux Laptop-HOWTO recommends
Debian for laptop installation. If you are familiar with Debian you might
have better luck with that. I would have tried that if the SuSE install
process gave me too much trouble.
Hope this helps.
--
Bud Rogers <budr@sirinet.net> http://www.sirinet.net/~budr/zamm.html
Though all my neighbors are barbarians, and you are a thousand miles away,
there are always two cups on my table.
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