Slighty OT Laptop Recommendation

[Jonathan Berry]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:49:26 -0700, Mike Hoy <mhoy4 at cox.net> wrote:
[snip]
> I bought a compq r3000 presario and have it all working fine, but i
> wouldn't do it again had i had the chance to. he offered to install
> linux on it for me but said it would cost more thatn 350 bucks because
> he has no experience writing kernels for compaq/hp.
> 
> bottom line:
> 
> buy a IBM t-21 or later
> or a dell with nvidia card
> don't buy HP/Compaq - not that they're impossible to setup, mine works,
> but major headache
[snip]

I have an R3000Z and it works great with Linux.  There are several
types of R3000s: a P4 version, AMD Athlon XP version, and Athlon 64
version.  Mine is an AMD64 machine and works great with FC3 x86_64. 
There are a few issues, sure, but with a modern laptop there is almost
sure to be something that you will have to work out.  I have certainly
had no problems that were "major headache"s (Mike didn't say, but
maybe he has the P4 version, I don't know).  And many of the initial
problems have been worked out in recent BIOS updates and with time as
some issues are 64-bit specific (ndiswrapper only recently became
usable with 64-bit, for instance).  Anyway, the R3000 also has a
mailing list that I've posted here many times where most issues that
have come up have been solved.  Many people are using these machines
(especially the 64-bit ones) with Linux.  Don't count it out,
especially because of the 64-bit.

Jonathan