Where can I buy a linux-friendly laptop?

[phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org]

I just purchased an $800 Acer laptop at Canada Computes. It has *no*
serial or parallel ports, but it does have 4 USB ports. I know you can get
usb-serial adaptors and I assume that the same sort of thing exists for
parallel ports. The serial port adaptor includes software drivers for
Windows, and in Linux the drivers are built into the kernel. They make the
USB port invisible and software thinks it's writing to a serial port which
is nice, because legacy software continues to work and USB is a
programming nightmare.

Peter



> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>
>> Have you seen a new laptop with a serial port on it?  Dell has a few,
>> but the majority no longer have them, except on the very highend large
>> screen models.  Seems weird, but that's how it is going.  I wonder when
>> the parallel port will disappear given it seems even less useful than
>> the serial port to me (who uses parallel for printers anymore?  At least
>> serial has a use still).
>
> Perhaps the space used by serial or parallel connectors could be better
> used for USB ports.
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-- 
Peter Hiscocks
Professor Emeritus,
Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Ryerson University
416-465-3007
www.ee.ryerson.ca/~phiscock

--
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TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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