[clug] Linux Laptop Machine Compatibility Gold Standard

[Tony Breeds]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 05:01:09PM +1000, Hal wrote:
> 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.)
> 
> Is there a similar machine that is used and recommend by more kernel
> hackers than any other nowadays? Or is it much of a muchness?
> Perhaps you pays your money and takes your pick?

It's clearly "fedora" centric but have a look at:
http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/

If you know the model you can see how a "current" distro will cope with it.

Yours Tony