Off topic-What notebook to get

[Rick Stevens]

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.
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