Thanks to all who responded to my earlier post seeking recommendations for a laptop.
I really wanted to find something that came with linux, thinking why pay for a copy of windows that I'm just going to trash. Unfortunately, the linux only machines don't compete all that well with the more aggressively priced windows machines.
I ended up buying an HP pavilion5300 series. I must admit that price was a huge factor, there are some very good deals out there. My other choice would have been a Sony Vaio but it would have cost at least $500 more for the same features.
SUSE 8.2 installed right out of the box like a dream, recognizing the built in wireless nic without missing a beat, updating applications over the web even before the download was complete. Although I've been using linux for years, it's been mainly on my older machines, for server and networking type stuff, after they've long become useless for windows. It's not that I prefer windows, only that I need it for certain applications (a proposition that I am seriously rethinking). Anyway, this is the first time in about five years that I've devoted a brand new machine to linux. IIFC, the last time was when Redhat 5 came out, whenever that was. Well, I was just blown away.
The only problem, if you can call it that, was getting samba up and running. I couldn't find anything in Yast to configure it. Maybe I missed it somewhere. Maybe it's just a measure of how the otherwise seamless installation spoiled me into thinking that there should be some automatic set up process. It did require me to change my login on my home windows machine (I wasn't using a login) and of course this has changed some of my windows configuration stuff, and I can't fix it, but that's a different matter altogether.
Again, thanks to all and kudos to SUSE for an excellent product.
Mike O'Neill www.oneillaw.com
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