On Monday 07 November 2005 21:53, Kai Ponte wrote:

...

Typically, Dell notebooks are easy on Linux. I have an Inspiron 600m with 10.0, and pretty much everything worked out of the box. Well, they don't all use the same hardware. A friend of mine has an Inspiron 5000 some or other (about a year old Pentium 4 notebook), of which the modem doesn't work in linux. There has been some problems relating to this notebook on the Debian-users list, but the person never told us if he managed to solve it.

I'm more interested in the graphics subsystem though. It comes with Intel Media Accelerator 900 (or something like that). I've had nothing but

with Intel graphics in linux, so I'm cautious. A friend of mine has a gateway Pentium-M with onboard intel, and his graphics looks OK, but I don't know if it's the same.

One can take a Radeon X300 optional, but it's quite expensive. This notebook is strictly for work, so I don't care if I cannot play Quake 4 on it (although that would be be a bonus). But if the Intel chip works

trouble perfectly,

I'd rather spend the extra money on a faster CPU or more RAM.

Yeah, I opted for an ATI card (9000, I think) which has been working great. 3D isn't quite optimized - BL-117 tends to crash and some of the 3GL screen savers flicker a bit too much for my tastes, but Tux Racer and Blender work. I've been very happy so far. Both 9.3 and 10 have been easy to setup on this machine. Check for sites like this: http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/dell.html Also check on linuxquestions.org - they'll have a ton of info. -- kai ponte www.perfectreign.com linux - genuine windows replacement part