| From: Jonathan Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

| As of now, I cannot recommend any laptops.

I presume that you meant that you cannot recommend any laptops with
AMD CPUs.  Intel is pretty good about supporting Linux for the
various chips that go into Centrino (CPU, 802.11abg, graphics).

|  I don't know why there is
| a lack of AMD and nVidia laptops, there always has been it seems. 

There seems to be a flavour of the season.  Perhaps because there are
so few real laptop makers (all brands of laptops seem to be made by a
small number of companies whose names are not known to the public).

nVidia chips were OK, not great, when the HP laptops used them.  Raw
graphics performance was not cutting edge (on MS Windows -- Linux
doesn't matter to those folks).  ATI is better for a number of
reasons, none of which matter to us Linux folks because the Linux
support is not there (yet?).

ATI headquarters are near me (I live in Toronto).  I have seen ATI ads for
Linux driver folk.  But the results are not up to the nVidia level.
At one point, ATI was decently supported in Linux, but that was a few
years ago.

In any case, I don't run binary drivers, so the nVidia support isn't
so great by my standards.  The Intel chipsets have a lot less raw
power but are better supported by open drivers.

In the back of my mind, I've wondered if ATI and nVidia have poor
support for Linux because they want to keep Microsoft happy.  After
all, they live and die by whatever features Microsoft supports in
Direct X.  Or in "Media Center Edition" of WinXP.  Or the chips
Microsoft chooses for Xboxen.

| Maybe Dell will get their act together and finally start selling AMD
| CPUs

Oddly enough, Dell does sell AMD CPU chips.  I don't understand why
because they sell no product that uses these chips.
http://news.com.com/Dell+is+selling+AMD+chips.+But+why/2100-1006_3-5940448.html
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