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I'm looking to buy a relatively inexpensive laptop to run Linux on. My budget is USD $1000. I'm curious if anyone has recommendations as to what makes a good choice for use with Linux. I plan to use the 2.6 kernel, and am looking for something light with a decent battery life.
Centrino technology sounds nice, with its small size and such. Linux support is more or less there, however it sounds like Intel's not sharing the needed specs with the free and open source communities.
I'm open to any advice and suggestions, especially first hand experiences...
good luck
Good luck. Even if you tripled your budget, you'd still have a laptop that didn't do something right (resume from suspend, sound features, accelerated 3D, onboard modem/wireless).
I would take a Knoppix/Gnoppix CD to your favourite computer place and go through the laptops until you find one that mostly works.
The ECS G556.
The ECS G556.
re: The ECS G556
This is the first I'd heard of the ECS G556... I did some digging with google and turned up a few forum discussions about it, but nothing major. And no hits on ebay or froogle, which strikes me as odd. Evidently ECS is a company from Taiwan that makes barebones laptops, which they sell to other companies who add their own branding/features and mark up the price.
Can anyone report having used it successfully with Linux? Souns like it's got a rather loud fan, but otherwise is a lot of bang for the bucks...
Perhaps I have to increase my budget.
go for apple iBooks
I don't think its a good idea to get a laptop that inexpensive, since their lifetime (computing power _and_ quality) is quite low. But, the best laptop I ever had for linux is a iBook G3.
suspend (sleep), wireless, X acceleration, cpu speed throttling... its everything suported.
But the iBookG4, the wifi card isn-t supported yet.
And you will have the pleasure of playing with another good XXI century unix: mac osx
Really, machintoshes are great machines, the arquitecture is very nice, they are pretty, well built and well supported.
Go get a iBook!
re: go for apple iBooks
After having done a fair amount of research, I'm coming to the same conclusion. For my price range, this seems to be the better/more reliable of the hardware out there. At least, I'm not finding the horror stories about iBooks that I'm finding about everything else I was interested in.
Any idea on the wifi card status for the G4 iBook? ie, may be fun to play with os X for a while until wifi support arrives, if in the near future. I'll do some digging.
Synaptics touchpad
Make sure the laptop has a synaptics touchpad. I can only heartily recommend them.
Once you've had one you never want to live again without scrolling (both horizontal and vertical) and (maybe) multi-finger detection. And all that without even touching any buttons.
If you want to use Linux, don
If you want to use Linux, don't choose a ppc, buy x86.
IMHO there are two types of x86 laptop's: ASUS and shitty :-P
Check ASUS
Linux works like a beaut on a
Linux works like a beaut on an ECS G556. I tested Fedora Core 3 and SUSE 9.1 Pro. I managed to get working
* ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 128MB using ATI's drivers. Works fine.
* RaLink RT2500 802.11g Wireless card using Ralink's GPLed drivers (untested on FC3)
* Agere Soft Modem (worked out of the box in SuSE, haven't tried FC3)
* Network (Realtek RTL-8139) worked out of the box.
* USB and Firewire worked out of the box
* Sound card worked out of the box using the intel ac97 driver.
* The Lite-On SOSW-852S DVD burner appears to read fine but I haven't tried burning yet.