Best Laptop for Linux

[Evan Leibovitch]

Muhammad Imran wrote:

> Hi guys,
> I am buying a Laptop for Linux. If anybody bought a laptop recently 
> that works fine with Linux (without lot of trouble), please let me 
> know which one.
> I am thinking to buy Dell Inspiron 6000 or Sony VAIO FS645PH. has 
> anybody tried linux on these?
>  


Hi Muhammad,

I've had good experiences with a number of IBM^H^H^HLenovo Thinkpads and 
Fujitsus over the years.

Most laptops are well supported, because they use fairly standard 
hardware. What you need to be aware of are:

- oddball BIOSs
- oddball (and unsupported) hardware
- different levels of Linux support for suspend/hibernate

Bleeding-edge stuff should be avoided, since some new hardware is often 
well-supported for a long time under Windows before getting Linux 
support. A good case in point is the Centrino wireless component, which 
has received reasonable support only recently -- even then, some of the 
driver is binary-only and installation is often poorly documented.

I seem to recall that at least one Sony in the past -- the V505 series 
-- was particularly badly supported when I was shopping at one time. It 
had features (special mouse controls, built-in cameras, weird video and 
aspect ratio) for which no reasonable support was available, and Sony 
was Linux-hostile at that time. (Don't know if they still are).

A very good resource is http://www.linux-laptop.net/ -- this site 
collects people's experiences, sorted by brand and model. It's probably 
a good idea to see what people have already had to say about installing 
Linux on the make/model you're considering.

You may also want to consider using a distribution which is known for 
particular strength with desktops and laptops. In my experience Ubuntu 
and Mandrake have tended to have more things working (without the need 
to spend much time under the hood) than most others. YMMV.

Hope this helps!

- Evan

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