[Novalug] favorite new laptops?

[David Zakar]

With the exception of the SD card reader (which I think actually does work
now, haven't checked), the HP zv6000 I bought a year and change ago worked
perfectly in Linux (Fedora), including the integrated GPU. Now, mind you, it
took about a year for the driver situation to come together, and it's still
using binary drivers for the video, but as of right now, it's golden.

Of course, it may fail your reliability test - the screen has a nasty line
of pixels running through it vertically, which is why it's retired to be a
file server. But it's definitely cheap these days!

IMHO, the best way to get a laptop that works perfectly with Linux is to aim
for something a 6-12 months old. Drivers take time to catch up with
hardware, or at least that's been my experience, and that's not just a Linux
issue. :)

-DMZ


On 11/1/07 7:36 AM, "Matt Bidwell" <bidwell at dead-city.org> wrote:

> Julia Christianson wrote:
>> Has anyone bought a laptop lately that "just works"?  I need to buy
>> something to send to my sister in Oklahoma ... she's never run Linux
>> for any period of time, but she knows she doesn't want Windows ;-).
>> I'll probably put CentOS on it even though I know ubuntu would
>> probably be better because (a) I'll be her sole support and I don't
>> know ubuntu and (b) I know CentOS will be supported for some
>> reasonable period of time.
>> 
>> Thanks for any suggestions.  Oh, and price is of course always a
>> factor but not the primary consideration.  (Resistance to failure and
>> an old-folks-readable screen are the primary considerations, with wifi
>> that won't break when a new kernel is installed coming in a close third.)
>> 
>> -- Julia
> 
> I don't know centos per se, but I do know RHEL.  I like RHEL on the
> IBM T40 through T60 lines.  The only thing you would need to do
> is get the madwifi drivers from http://rpm.pbone.net/ which
> is very easy when you do the advanced search and look only
> for drivers from centos/rhel.  After that it should just work.
> 
> Matt
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