Off topic-What notebook to get

[Karl Pearson]

On Tue, March 20, 2007 2:36 pm, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 15:34 -0500, Fred Grant wrote:
>> Our youngest son will soon be in the market for a laptop/notebook.  I
>> would appreciate the latest skinny on what's out there that seems to
>> provide good value.
>>
>> He'll need wifi for sure and will probably use some form of (gasp!)
>> Windows as he hasn't any technical inclination whatsoever.  That means
>> security will be an issue.
>>
>> Games are not a big deal but some decent capability should be built in.
>>
>> I should mention that he is 31 years old to sort of frame the situation
>> more completely.
>
> Well, gee.  I've used Linux on several laptops with pretty good
> success.  I think the consensus on most lists have the Acer and
> IBM (Lenova) laptops in the lead.  Personally, I've used a Fujitsu C3200
> series in the past and I'm using an older HP Pavillion zv6300 (AMD
> Athlon 64) currently.  I'm running Fedora Core 6 on the laptop, but I
> have run Ubuntu, CentOS and RHEL on it as well.
>
> The most common issues remain the wifi chipsets and modems.  Both of the
> laptops I've used have the Broadcom wifi chipset and I've never been
> fond of the bcm43xx driver.  It often has problems with WEP encryption
> and stuff like that.  I stick with ndiswrapper and the Winblows driver.
> Most laptops use a soft modem and drivers can be a problem.  There's
> better support for the Conexant modems than any of the others, but your
> mileage may vary.  I'd suggest you check http://www.linux-laptop.net for
> info on any specific model you may be interested in.
>
> If you get an AMD Athlon/X2 or Intel dual-core machine, your son may be
> able to use Xen to run Windows and Linux simultaneously.  Note that you
> must have hardware virtualization to run Windows under Xen.  The other
> option for simultaneous operation is to get and use VMware.

With VMWare Server being free, that's a good way to go.

I am typing this on an Everex Stepnote, and everything but the modem works.
Since I can plug my RAZR into it and use it as a modem, with coverage where
there's no phone lines, I don't care. It comes with the Atheros chipset, so
WiFi support is good.

I have heard that Acer gets the best reviews for overall Linux success,
however they aren't as solidly built as the Lenovo. But, the difference isn't
much.

On my laptop, I repartitioned it without removing Win XP home. I dual boot,
but with Wine getting so much better, I can now run the windows programs I
need in Linux, with a few glitches, but successfully none the less.

Karl

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-- 
karl
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