laptop..

[pete at loshin.com (Pete Loshin)]

At 08:22 PM 11/29/99 -0800, Ed Miner wrote:

>i am in the market for a laptop, and would like to run linux as my
>primary system on the laptop alongside windows 98. can anyone recommend
>a laptop for which i will not have a lot of problems trying to get the
>audio/cdrom/dvd to work? i am currently thinking about sony vaio's
>however, i would like to hear back whether people have gotten linux to
>work on those? otherwise what systems do you recommend? dell/compaq/ibm?

I picked up a good deal on a Vaio at Microcenter's big sale a couple of
weeks ago. After some dorking around, I managed to get it up and running as
a dual-boot system. There's some web resources that you should look at:
especially don't go and repartition the entire hard drive (as I did)
because there's a little section there that is used to save the suspended
system state.

Also, I got a "kernel panic" or some such message when I tried to install
Linux on its own; dual-booting from LILO requires that enter "linux" at the
LILO boot (or "dos" to go to windows) to avoid that message.

I don't know why, I don't really care, as long as it works.

As for choosing a laptop, I'd say just go for the one with the keyboard you
like best, and also that has a "three-spindle" design (hard drive, floppy
drive, and CD ROM all integrated into the basic box). And do a Google (or
whatever) search on "linux+[laptop model/make]". People tend to write up
and publish their experiences with installing Linux on laptops, and that
can give you a good idea of whether the installation will be hard or not.

Enjoy!
-pl


+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Loshin                    http://Internet-Standard.com |
|                                                             |
| _IPv6 Clearly Explained_ Morgan Kaufmann January 1999       |
| _TCP/IP Clearly Explained_ 3rd ed Morgan Kaufmann June 1999 |
|                                                             |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

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