Joona Kiiski wrote:
Hello everyone, I've been using debian a couple of years (still a newbie for most of you hackers, though), but never installed it in laptop. Soon I'm buying a new laptop and want to make sure it works smoothly with debian. I assume the biggest problem is the screen controller. I tried to take a look at debian's and X.org's documentation, but didn't find a clear answer which screen controllers work cleanly with debian (and X.org) and which not. In the past: * ATI's drivers were a big problem (is that still the case?)
Yes the ATI binary driver has few fans but if you can find a laptop with an older R300 or R400 generation GPU the open driver is very good, alternatively the newer GPUs are supported by RadeonHD which is quite immature and has no acceleration yet, but the advantage of this is that every time new features get added you'll feel like you've upgraded your laptop.
* Nvidia drivers worked (at least after installing closed source drivers manually) (is that still the case?)
They mostly work and you have nouveau maturing nicely, one day we may have open source drivers
* I've heard that Intel GMA should just work (is that the case?)
Good but slow.
Are there any other possible critical hardware incompatibilities (fx. with sound system, dvd-drives, ethernet cards etc.) I should know about
Wireless cards and webcams are the main culprits.I'm looking for a laptop with a dual core AMD64 CPU, AMD GPU with dedicated (non-shared) GRAM, built in webcam, user changeable Harddrive & battery, high RAM capacity, large high quality screen, a nice keyboard and good linux support for all the power saving, suspends, wifi etc....
I'd also like it to have DVI, SPDIF, USB2, FireWire, jumbo frame GbE, Infrared and eSATA ports
Has anyone seen one?