Recommended laptop for FC5, was: glxgears

[Igor Jagec]

Mike A. Harris wrote:

> I'm often asked which laptop chipset one should buy, or which
> laptop chipset is best supported.

It would be much easier for us if we could buy a laptop with Linux
preinstalled, which I haven't seen yet here in Croatia. I saw some
laptops with FreeDOS, but not with Linux.

BTW why Red Hat does not make some contract with some laptop
manufacturer in order to bring Red Hat or fedora to laptops? Is that
such a bad idea? I saw that Mandriva and Ubuntu made this with some
manufacturers (HP, I think) for some markets (South America, I think).

> Here are 2 answers I generally
> give, and they're dead honest, albeit a bit blunt.  I say that
> because sometimes people think I'm blowing them off, when I'm
> really just giving the reality of things:
> 1) None of the video chipsets are supported "the best".  Roll
>     a dice, you get a video chipset that has some supported
>     features, along with various bugs/problems to work around.
> or
> 2) Whichever video chip works best for one's purposes after
> they manually test every laptop on the market with the current
> drivers, and decide which one meets their needs.

I use nVidia (Xelo FX5200) with closed source drivers because TV out is
well supported.

> Yes, these answers suck, but they reflect reality, which also
> sucks.  My advice is don't buy a laptop unless you can get
> by with the kernel console driver and 24 VCs. ;)

I've got an impression that IBM's are well supported on Linux:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-48NT8D.html
There are probably some other manufacturers as well supported, but I
didn't quite make any further research.

-- 
Igor Jagec