On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 2:22 AM, Daniel Dalton <d.dal...@iinet.net.au> wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm having great difficulty in finding a laptop suitable for my > needs. I'm vision impaired and a student, so primarily will use the machine > for > school, and at home. > > Here is what I'm looking for: good debian linux support, including wifi, > ethernet, sound, and the general hardware of the machine. > I'm looking for something fairly recent, so I've got half a chance at > locating one in Australia, but any suggested models would be greatly > appreciated. I'm looking for something with a core 2 duro around 1.6 > ghz or more, and I want something with really good battery life, perhaps > 5 hours or more. I have about $1,000 to spend give or take. Finally, I'm > going to be carrying it around school every day, so portability is > important to me. > > So basically it must have: > - Good debian support including wiffi > - core 2 duro 1.6 ghz or more > - Good battery life 5 hours or more. > > I've been looking mainly at lenovo, hp, del, acer and maybe tosheba. > > Any suggested models would be greatly appreciated. > > Cheers, > Dan > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) > > iEYEARECAAYFAktTqc4ACgkQQCYsNYjKJVDaoACgtMC+QMAti5qQS2eJfqLHu5Ob > XqMAoIc7+DsdVSBi2TKwSnGleWZ+0wLN > =Aips > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > >
Hello, When it comes to good Linux support, I always advise looking towards the acquisition of an hp laptop, perhaps with an Intel GMA or other sorts of Intel onboard GPU, (for people like yourself wo are not interested in heavy duty graphics support) primarily because you will virtually never have any problems with closed source graphic card drivers (Intel's drivers are free software and are henceforth included by the official Debian distribution). I have been especially pleased by my 4-year old Pavillion laptop, which runs Debian smoothly @ 1GB of ram and with a Centrino processor. It's construction is also pretty solid and ergonomic, albeit based on PVC, which is not the healthiest of materials (like most of today's laptops). HP is also very dedicated to receiving and processing complaints about faulty hardware, and the company has frequently made public announcements regarding free substitutions of battery models that have been known to overheat, for example. By buying an HP laptop you're also helping a company that sponsors free software to an extent, they were among the main contributors to the most recent DebConf ( http://debconf9.debconf.org/ ). There are a few downsides to my proposal, of course, the most notable of which being that I'm not very sure what vision support you'd like from a laptop's screen in order to assist you in your work. Perhaps you're looking into a specialised system, with a 19'' screen at least. Also, my HP pavillion has an integrated GMA graphics card which, even though very helpful in the sense that I've never had to care about drivers (for the reasons I've mentioned earlier in this mail), is also quite weak. I can't run the KDE 4 effects from my laptop, but I used to run some Compiz Fusion effects when I was running Ubuntu (desktop cube, mainly). Of course this isn't a real problem, you can always get an HP laptop with a strong graphics card. Nvidia cards work well with Linux and the company provides well-functioning proprietary drivers, I'd look into that after a friend of mine had serious trouble with the discontinuation of ATI's support for his Radeon. I also noted your need for a strong battery, yet I don't think any out-of-the-box HP laptop (not any I have come across, at least) has such a strong battery, you'd need to order a larger one yourself. This last observation is very prone to error, though, due to my limited knowledge of different battery types. I see you've increased your budget, this could help you look into one of those new pavillions with an i7 processor (if you REALLY want to step it up) but you don't need such a strong machine for office work imo. All in all, I'd go for an HP laptop both because of the high-quality of their pavillion laptops and because of their support of open source and Linux, both financially and technically. Jason -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-laptop-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
