Laptop recommendations

[gboyce at badbelly.com (gboyce at badbelly.com)]

On Fri, 14 May 2004, David Kramer wrote:

> So I want to buy a high-end laptop (probably below $2,000).  I know there's a 
> few sites that cover linux on laptops, but they often contain coflicting 
> information and views.  I would rather solicit information from people I 
> know.  Features and speed are more important than size or battery life.
> 
> Has anyone bought a laptop and put Linux on it recently?

I went the other route with my laptop purchase.  I wanted something small 
with a long battery life, and ended up going with the IBM Thinkpad x31.  I 
had a few issues getting linux on it when I first bought it, but i believe 
it was just too new to be supported by most distributions at the time.

These days it works great.  The 2.6 kernel has support for CPU Frequency 
scaling so I can actually have my processor slow down in order to save 
power when I'm not plugged in.  (Available as a patch for 2.4 as well)

The only issues I have with the laptop is bugs with both the ACPI and APM 
support.  ACPI suspension sometimes causes random video corruption, and 
the the screen does not get turned off when suspended.  With APM, 
suspensions work fine but occasionally the machine fails to unsuspend.  It 
is infrequent enough to be good enough usually.

The laptop has the Centrino chipset with the intel ipw2100 wireless 
mini-pci card.  For the first 6 months I was running it with driverloader 
from linuxant.  Basically windows drivers under linux.  Since then Intel 
has released actual drivers which are pretty stable.  A few features are 
missing, but they're scheduled for addition soon.

--
Greg