On Tue, 21 May 2002, Derek Broughton wrote: > No flames from me. That pretty much sums it up - price vs. quality. Not a > big difference either way, but Dell IS renowned for bad BIOSes. What's the > status of IBM support for Linux in the retail market, these days? Dell
They actually ship some laptops with a distro on: I forget which - even if you use a different distro, this is worth grabbing as you can snaffle any kernel params or binary-only programs that come with. ( The one that catches presses of the thinkpad button comes to mind: apparently one of the more deranged bits of IBM has decided that it would be damaging to IBMs intellectual property to tell us how that button works. ) I didn't get linux with my A20p, because they weren't shipping at the time, but I'd definitely buy one again - great keyboard, nice mouse replacement (a rubber-nipple-thingy as opposed to a trackpad), great screen, and nice keyboard (for a laptop). Oh, and 3 mouse buttons. The one thing you need to be careful about is the graphics chipset - they do get supported after a while, but I had to wait a couple of months before mine became widely supported. (I had to hybridise a debian-woody Xfree package with Xfree CVS till tyhat happened) - this is typically only a problem for the brand-shiny-new thinkpads - older models should be fine. Oh - and if you need a modem, make sure you get the mini-pci card with the modem that works, not the bizarre winmodem thingy that doesn't. (Don't remember which was which - don't use one myself). -- "Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way." -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
