Shao Zhang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Hi, > I am in a process of buying a new laptop. I cannot really afford > any expensive ones (above AUS$3000), yet a powerfull one. I know > my requirements are contradicting to each other. > > A thinkpad will be ideal for me, but they are just so expensive. > I happen to find out this site > http://www.iedirect.com/default.asp > > Their laptop is so much cheaper compare to others, but I am a > bit worried if it will run on Linux. > > Has anyone else bought any laptops from this site? Could someone > recommend what/where to buy new laptops for linux?
I just bought a Thinkpad 240 from www.elinux.com. Their price was US$1069, which was almost US$100 less than the best price on Pricewatch. The basic machine is a 300 MHz Celeron with 64 megs and a 6.4 G HD. I added 64 megs, a larger battery , a network card and a case and it still came out less than US$1500. They have a web page at http://www.elinux.com. I was not comfortable with their secure order page. I spent a while on the phone with a guy named Todd. He went out of his way to find answers to my questions. We had a misunderstanding on the network card and he took care of it promptly. FWIW their phone number is 1-877-395-4689. Todd's extension is 4154. Sorry if this sounds like a commercial. I have no affiliation with them other than as a satisfied customer. The 240 came with Win98 on a 2 G partition. The remaining 4+ G partition was totally empty. I need M$ at work, so I decided to keep the Win98 partition and install SuSE 6.3 on the rest. The process has not been totally painless. I had planned to install via nfs from this box, but I couldn't get networking up to my satisfaction. I have since tweaked the pcmcia configuration and it's much better though still not perfect. I copied the basic system files into the Win98 partition, then used SuSE's 'Install from a reachable partition' process to install the base system from there. Then I booted the base system and continued the installation via ftp from this box. All of that was more complicated and took longer than it probably should have. I had never messed with pcmcia before. I just got the system fully installed last night. I'm still booting from DOS via loadlin. Today I plan to build a kernel with APM support and I may install lilo. X works fine at 800x600 using the SVGA server. I got a XF86Config file that worked out of the box from http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~peetz/thinkpad.html. All I had to do was make a symlink from /varX11R6/bin/X to the SVGA server, and a symlink from /dev/mouse to /dev/psaux, and it came up just fine. Sound doesn't work, but I haven't had time to even look at that yet. Anyway so far I'm happy with the Thinkpad 240. It's not the biggest or fastest, but I think it's a pretty good value for the money. I put SuSE on it because that's what I have here. The Linux Laptop-HOWTO recommends Debian for laptop installation. If you are familiar with Debian you might have better luck with that. I would have tried that if the SuSE install process gave me too much trouble. Hope this helps. -- Bud Rogers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.sirinet.net/~budr/zamm.html Though all my neighbors are barbarians, and you are a thousand miles away, there are always two cups on my table.
