Re: Laptop recomendation?

[Peter <peter@bsqt.homeip.net>]

My Dell Latitude D600 centrino-based laptop underwent a dramatic 
transformation this week.  I got it this summer, with a Pentium M & Centrino 
with 1 G RAM.  Knoppix 3.6 installed in a straight-forward manner on it.  I 
then changed /etc/apt/sources.list to be a more standard sargish sort of set, 
so it is gradually converging to sarge.  That was in September.  It 
worked fine, including the display, but none of the cool features worked:
ipw2200 (wlan), suspend, hibernate, acpi throttling did not seem to work 
either, and sound sometimes worked, and sometimes not.  Without power
saving features, it was kind of confined to the desktop.  Throughout the fall, 
regular googling and trying things out brought no joy, nothing on the net 
helped.

I installed took a kernel.org 2.6.10, with the latest ipw and acpi patches 
from sf.net, and as of yesterday, I have at least S1 and S3 suspend/resume,
ALSA working flawlessly, and my wireless works as well, though only with 
128-bit WEP, no WPA-PSK.  All of the limitations are documented, so I expect 
them to be resolved in time.

It is now a great linux laptop, provided you are willing to build your own
kernel.  Most of the special keys work, although I haven't figured out the 
volume & mute keys yet.   Have not tried the burner yet (have lots of 
others.)