Linux Laptop turnkey

[Kevin Brown]

Well I should hopefully be getting my laptop back from Panasonic with its 2GB
drive reimaged sometime this week.  When I get it back I'm going to be putting
in a 20GB drive that I got.  I've been able to get RH installed on it in the
past (5.2 - 6.x), but always seem to hit or miss on something with the
configuration.  I haven't had much success in doing things like recompiling
kernels, and pcmcia is a bit flaky with the version that comes with RH (latest
is 3.1.8 iirc), again not much success when downloading from CVS on sourceforge
and recompiling.  I was downloading the 4 isos for Debian (Disk 1-3 and Non-us)
to try out at work and see how that works and to give me some experience in a
non-RH version of linux.

I've had good success with getting sound to work, but of course I cheat by
getting the configuration while in windows.

> >    Hardware-wise I want 500+ MHz, 128Mbytes, & 10+ Gbytes.
> >       As for the screen . . . I haven't played a computer game in months.
> 
> That'll blow my desktop away :). Make sure you go for something with good
> battery life.
> 
> >     However, scrubbing a brand-new 'working' system is galling.
> > Nevertheless, to be rid of Windows Me I would do it -- but given the
> > problems people seem to have installing Linux on laptops and my schedule
> > crunch, now is not the time to spend a week tinkering with installing an OS
> > and its applications.
> 
> On an non-wierd system, e.g. toshiba libretto and some other
> pre-subnotebook-type of things, I've never really had a problem getting
> Linux running on a laptop. This includes things that M$ variants couldn't
> be made to work on.
> 
> I did have some probs with some refurbed compaqs, but that was because the
> hardware comprising the mouse was borken.
> 
> I will admit that I haven't had any success with sound, but only really
> tried once.
> 
> One does have to be careful about peripherals, e.g. PCMCIA and CardBus
> stuff.