Yes, Sean, that is a very good site for laptop info.
I bought an Acer aspire 4550 laptop not long ago. amd64 2core, 2GB mem,
160GB hd, 15".
Centos and ubuntu 10.10 did not support the Atheros 9500 series wireless
chips. I found that the kernel has to be at least 2.6.34 for the support.
As mentioned before, the new hardware has a lag for support.
Forunately, I just got a later kernel and compiled using slackware,
and everything worked the way it should. I did like the kde screen that
slackware displayed.
As for older laptops being more likely to work, recently a friend had
a 512MB old acer laptop with a dead windows system.
Ubuntu: No level of Ubuntu would boot for installation. Just start and
hang forever with a blank blue (ha ha) screen with a blinking cursor
in the upper left corner.
At least for an hour, anyway. I tried it several times before I gave up
Centos installed OK. Slackware installed OK.
I left centos on it because it is easier for her to know how to get new
packages via yum, rpm, apt, etc. and add to the repository lists.
There was no wireless, so I used a Belkin usb wireless antenna.
No problem with the usb wireless, except that it is a pain to keep having
to fiddle with the configuration.
I got the rpms for wicd and urwid. wicd is great. It finds all of the
active networks and their available info essid .. sorts them by signal
strength, shows you the list click on your choice to connect.
You can give networks passwords so you don't have to keep entering them.
You can set an option that automatically connects to the available
network with the best signal strength.If that goes away, it automatically
finds another one.
The down side was that the audio did not work properly.
You could hear it, but it was very low volume. I ran into this problem
once in 2005, on a desktop, and I did not have time to pursue it then.
I thought maybe alsa was muted or something, but that was not the case.
All the settings appeared normal. If I fiddled around with alsa enough
I could probably get it to work.
She is able to use it now, anyway, and it was dead before, so I guess that
is an improvment.
Personally, I like the thinkpads, and the acers. I have always been able
to get linux to run on them.
Lex
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