John Pettigrew writes:

[ ... ] That being so, what sort of spec am I looking at? The thing is that a new= laptop is about GBP650 for a basic model, but even GBP500 seems to buy a = very poor second-hand machine by comparison (such as a P3-650, when the GBP650= could get a Celeron 2.4 GHz).

Are there any dangers I need to be aware of when buying a laptop on which= to run linux?

Yes. You should do some homework and try to determine what chipsets are used in the laptop for the video graphics, ethernet, wireless, sound, usb, modem, etc., and check if an appropriate driver exists in SuSE 9.1 for each. While this is true for any computer, laptops seem to deviate more from the usual "standards" than desktops and servers. Unlike M$ Windows, which usually comes pre-installed with all needed drivers supplied; you have to spend some effort to make sure that the particular Linux distro and kernel can fully take advantage of all the features on the machine. For starters, you can use these as resources: http://hardwaredb.suse.de/index.php?LANG=en_UK http://www.linux-laptop.net/ http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Laptop-HOWTO.html http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/ http://www.linuxhardware.org/ There are more, search google for help. -Ti

On Tuesday 05 October 2004 01:54, John Pettigrew wrote:

I am thinking of buying a laptop to use as a second computer round the house - for my young son to play with, for my wife to check email while I'm working, and very occasional trips away, that sort of thing.

I don't know how much you are interested in spending, but HP has a notebook called the nx5000. Also, you can get cheap notebooks here, and they sell ONLY Linux, so you can be sure that their machines will run Linux. They sell their notebooks with Linspire by default. I actually went ahead and got a Linspire notebook, because I needed to play commercial DVDs, and as far as I know Linspire is the ONLY Linux distro which will run commercial DVDs. http://www.sub300.com I know that lots of heavy duty Linux wizards frown on Linspire because it runs in root. But maybe you can configure it to run in a user account. I am a simple end user, so I have no clue. I use SuSE 9.1 on two desktops and one Acer notebook that I bought super cheap. If you only need webbing and office productivity stuff, then probably any cheap used notebook will run SuSE 9.1. But if you want something that works out of the box for all of the features that you list below, and you don't want to do lots of handholding for your son and your wife, you really should consider a Linspire notebook. Especially if you want wireless networking. A friend of mine who is a Windows geek had trouble getting his copy of SuSE 9.1 working with wifi. I went over there with my Linspire notebook and he got it running zip zap.

What I want, therefore, is something that will run SUSE 9.1 fairly well, probably using XFce4 or ROX as the desktop rather than KDE, I'd guess. It needs to have enough grunt to cope with playing Flash games for my son, and other multimedia tasks, and it requires wireless networking.

That being so, what sort of spec am I looking at? The thing is that a new laptop is about GBP650 for a basic model, but even GBP500 seems to buy a very poor second-hand machine by comparison (such as a P3-650, when the GBP650 could get a Celeron 2.4 GHz).

Are there any dangers I need to be aware of when buying a laptop on which to run linux?

Mostly it's the peripherals. You probably are a more sophisticated user than I, and others on the list already talked about the hardware issues. But that again is why I chose Linspire. I wanted it to work out of the box. In addition to e-Bay, you can also get inexpensive notebooks here: http://www.bedfordmicro.com However, they sell mostly Win-enabled notebooks. In fact, I don't know if they sell ANY Linux enabled notebooks. But they do at least pack OOo onto most stuff.