Linux on a laptop?

[RipperRoo]

im looking into buying a laptop and looing at even the best deals i would have to get a bankloan to cover my o/s and software requirements, so i was thinkng of going linux on a laptop.

i have one spyed out thats just about within my reach, £515.82 + delivery without the microsoft curse to empty my pockets

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/NBrange.html?MVK

can anyone forsee any possible issues installing either redhat, mandrake, or any of the other flavours on this machine?

[technobeast]

Hey Rip, congrats on the idea of Linux. I looked everywere posible but didn't find anything suspicious. The hardware looks OK (seen Linux running on similar) it's just the videocard that worries me. S3 just doesn't sound reliable. POssible driver problems. Of course not for 2D - it should work without drivers. But 3D sounds problematic. I've realized that the only company that gives best support for their cards in Linux is NVidia - drivers all the way. Even ATI couldn't bring any drivers till soon (not sure though because I never had an ATI card just heard complaints from Linux ppl).

[Pasty901]

I had an old S3 PCI gfx card in a linux box workin pretty good! but im not so sure about laptop support

[technobeast]

Originally posted by Pasty901
I had an old S3 PCI gfx card in a linux box workin pretty good! but im not so sure about laptop support

Yup, I'm sure this one will work too but what I was trying to point out is that->
1) 2D will get no problems (probably) - browsing, word processing, console, etc...
2) 3D (OpenGL) apps and games may experience problems or not run at all. NVidia based cards have a great OpenGL support and benchmarked with other (ATI) card give better results in OpenGL (that was the reason ATI announced that they will rewrite the OpenGL part of their drivers from scratch - Doom3 performs better with NVidia cards)
3) DirectX will not be important (or at least when it comes to native Linux apps) because DX is M$ product you know.

hmm. I don't think I explained my point clearly... anyways for Linux and 3D i'm sure that NVidia is OK. Cannot be sure for others

[greffov]

s3 is some sort of 'standard' As for the 3d stuff, that card doesn't sound as a 3d monster, so just stick to ya terminal

redhat is exit, fedora sucks, so you have to go for SuSe, or a real distro (Gentoo ofcourse ).

NVidia's support is limited too, ATI is a nightmare. NVidia is a nightmare as well by the way, but not with Gentoo, where the installation is somewhat automated.

Basically openGL is nice for screensavers and Tux racer, but yeah... didn't you wanna work on that laptop?

[RipperRoo]

just shows the difference between the os's, on MS wondows you play games, on Linux you actualy get some work done

[Asterix]

Well one small idea if u can get physical access to the laptop b4 you buy and salesman lets u load then, why not try loading Knoppix it is pretty good distro based on Debian and does really good job with hardware detection. So, that u can check b4 you buy.

[RipperRoo]

unfortunatly its an online store so no physical acess is possible, but one thing i am considering is buying an oem xp pro with the machine, but asking them not to install it, then i can try out a few flavours and if/when i find one i like i can upgrade my old 1200athlon pc to XP pro - if not and everything goes pear shaped(no drivers available - poor usability - compatability issue) i still have the fall back copy, and as for office app's, i guess openoffice is as good as any