On 04/08/2011 12:19 AM, David Kramer wrote: > Adding my experience, a lot has to do with which Dell line you get. > Like many companies, there's a big difference between their > light-and-cheap line, their multimedia-gaming line, and their business > line. I always buy from the business line, and have been very happy > with the construction (and full linux compatibility). For instance, the > business line has a metal chassis instead of a plastic one, and are more > powerful. I have a Latitude D820 and my wife has a D830. I agree, except my experience is more with HP. My HP laptop has got to be 7 years old, and I only use it at the installfests to burn DVDs, but I used to bring it to work and BLU meetings. It is an early 64-bit AMD Turion processor. It was also certified for LInux by HP. At the installfests it seems we always had some issues with Dells, but the lower end laptops are very cost reduced for any brand. I'm not sure if this is still true, but you could get 2 identical Dell desktops, and look inside and they might have different chips and boards. Again, I'm not sure if this is still true. WRT Installfests, I still tend to favor Lenovo Thinkpads. But my Acer Aspire One netbook booted up with Ubuntu nearly perfectly the first time. After the initial installation, I had to install b43-fwcutter, but in Ubuntu, the installation of b43-fwcutter also gives you an option to download and install the firmware where other distributions do not. (Mint Linux, for instance I had to install b43-fwcutter from the Ubuntu repositories). In other distros you download the appropriate Windows Broadcom driver and use fwcutter to isolate and install the firmware.
-- Jerry Feldman <[email protected]> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 584
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
