New Laptop questions

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Jun 18, 2009, at 3:51 PM, ref wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 15:33 -0400, Englander, Irvin wrote:
>
>> Before you buy a new HP laptop, check it with the version of Linux  
>> that you plan to run. There have been BIOS problems with a number  
>> of HP laptops. I was unable to get Live CDs (several different  
>> distribs) to run on the laptops that our students get at school.  
>> Most crashed and froze on bootup. With some difficulty, we were  
>> able to do full installs of Fedora, but even there, there were  
>> issues and challenges along the way. I've also had problems with a  
>> recent HP desktop at home.
>>
>
> Wow - that must be new coz the dv8000t has been running Ubuntu, Debian
> and Fedora since the day I bought it without problems ...
> Thanks for the heads up though, I will go read up on the BIOS...

Nope, its nothing new. HP has been pretty hit-and-miss with their BIOS  
quality for a while now. Some machines are great, others... notsomuch.  
Its not restricted to laptops either, the xw9300 and xw9400  
workstations were an absolute train wreck, requiring a ton of back and  
forth to get them to fix several issues, as well as a fair amount of  
quirking within the kernel. I don't know specific laptop models w/ 
issues off hand, but they're definitely out there.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org