[clug] Linux Laptop Machine Compatibility Gold Standard

[Andrew Janke]

> Last time I was in the market for a laptop. The IBM T42 was the the thing
> used & recommended by linux hackers as having the best support out of the
> box. It surely did, everything just worked with a knoppix disk. (Support
> actually has deteriorated over the years because ATI opened their specs so
> the free drivers were re-written and are considerably less usable nowadays
>  but who cares? The laptop is dying anyway and nobody uses radeon mobility
> 7500 cards anymore. Stuff happens.)

Given that I too was once a happy T42 + dock linux bunny I feel your
pain although in my case it was BGA GPU card problem that caused it to
(mostly) die in the end.  I decided to try a "cheap" laptop and bought
an ASUS N52VF "thing".  Yes it is "rudimentary" and is awful to type
on if you have to use it as a laptop but the quality is still a whole
lot better than what I expected.

But then it spends 99.9% of its time plugged into a 27" + 21" LCD (via
HDMI + VGA ports) with an external keyboard and rat so I care not.

Everything "just worked" except the finger print reader, it probably
could be made to but I have zero interest.


--
Andrew Janke
(a.janke at gmail.com || http://a.janke.googlepages.com/)
Canberra->Australia    +61 (402) 700 883