Looking for recommendations for Linux laptop

[Jeff Garland]

Daniel Parraz wrote:
> I have had a good experience with Toshiba so far. I would recommend to 
> find a few affordable laptops, and then google them with the Distro she 
> would like to run, and see if anyone on "*linux*-on-*laptop*s.com" has 
> experience.

I can't comment on Toshiba w/ Linux, but my experience is that their hardware 
is first rate.  I still have a 1997 vintage Toshiba laptop that Motorola sold 
me when they replaced all their hardware with Dell's -- my kids still use it 
for games.  A friend of mine still has his and it still works. These are so 
old, they don't have a USB port...hadn't been invented yet. The Dell laptop 
that replaced it was crap -- had to have the screen replaced twice and had to 
be repaired constantly b/c the motherboard didn't have screws  on one of the 
sides that had electrical contacts.  I literally used to 'hit it' in the right 
way to make it come out of a comatose state.  Of course, this isn't a 
scientific survey, or anything, but in my view there was a clear quality 
difference and Dell wasn't the winner.  Since then I've purchased another 
Toshiba laptop -- it's about 4 years old now -- not even a hint of a problem 
-- and it's even been dropped once in a horrible sounding crash to to floor 
from a table.  Again I don't know how Linux would work, but I expect it would 
be fine based on other reports I've seen. I'd install Linux myself, but I need 
'doze' on one machine it for business reasons.

On a different front, a couple years back I salvaged/installed ~25 IBM laptops 
with Mandrake 9 for my daughters charter school.  Worked beautifully once they 
had enough memory (thanks to azstrut which had a bunch of surplus memory 
chips).   I was successful in getting wireless networking setup with a dlink 
card on those. Even for old, cheap laptops the IBM's (now Lenovo) had a 
really, really nice keyboard -- best one I've used on a laptop.  So, your 
faculty member might not realize it, but if she's going to be doing typing in 
front of a class that IBM keyboard might make life easier.

So, in summary, I'd look toward Lenovo or Toshiba and run away from Dell.

Jeff