[ILUG-BOM] Which laptop offers best support for Linux ?

[Raj Mathur]

On Monday 02 Mar 2009, Priyank Patel wrote:
> Im planning to buy a new laptop, and i intend to use Linux as the
> operating system i use on the machine. My
> old latop had Via chipset in it, and therefore i have faced lots of
> trouble in making Linux work on it, so this time i want to make sure
> that the machine I buy, would fully support it.
> So, i need some recommendations as to which laptop would be the best
> as far as Linux support goes. I am planning to buy a Dell Inspiron
> 1525. Is it the right choice or should i consider something else ?

I've been using the Dell Latitude E5400 with Debian for about 4 months 
now.  It's a Core 2 Duo at some 2.3GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 1280x800 
14" display.  Purchased with FreeDos, so didn't have to pay Winduhs 
tax.

Most of the stuff has been working fine.  Major gotchas are:

- The WiFi adapter doesn't work with the FOSS drivers.  The closed 
source driver works fine.  The good news is that a FOSS driver for the 
chipset is expected Real Soon Now.

- Suspend to RAM and resume didn't work for quite a while, but I managed 
to get it running after lots of tedious searching on the web and 
experimentation.  Suspend to disk also works, but resume still 
doesn't :)

Apart from that I've done all sorts of stuff on the box including Xen 
virtual machines and Oracle (for a porting project), didn't face any 
problems.

If you can live with the two limitations I'd recommend the machine.

Regards,

-- Raju
-- 
Raj Mathur                raju at kandalaya.org      http://kandalaya.org/
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