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Laptop opinions. | by vetitice | 2006-11-19 12:55:59 |
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Also, as a first experience with linux | by Havoc | 2004-12-21 10:09:40 |
| Linux Laptops, longish and opinionated (as always) |
by wwill |
2004-12-21 11:35:22 |
COMMENTS QUOTED:
"a laptop is a sure-fire way to kill whatever linux curiosity they may have"
AND
" the hardware support on laptops is questionable."
That's one of those true-but-false statements. It certainly -can- be a module-hunting nightmare, but doesn't -have- to be.
I have a salvaged Dell Inspiron 7000, stock, off-the-shelf plus some RAM for 384 megs total. EVERYTHING works just fine, sound, video (including the MPEG board), DVD, modem, USB, ... everything. The two cardbus cards I use (wireless and wired ethernet) were specifically chosen because they were supported, but other than that, I made no special changes or choices. Heck, the lappie was given to me by two idiot-children (University students), they had dropped it and smashed the LCD - new one for about $75 on e-Pay is my total investment besides the RAM), so I didn't get to shop for compatibility.
NEXT STATEMENT:
"Put Windows XP sp2 on it, configure it to automatically download and install all critical patches, anti-virus updates, etc and all will be good."
For some value of "good" this is possibly true. For any value of "But I don't WANT viruses and spyware and backdoor trojans," the statement is patently false. Let them LEARN something, use their freakin' brains a little, and try Linux or ****BSD instead. Maybe not everyone should eat Pablum for every meal. Just because all those other lemmings are falling off the cliff onto the rocks below does not mean that you should follow them. If they need to for some obscure compatibility reason for some oddball piece of software that the OpenSourcerors haven't made an analogue of (yet!), they can switch back. But encourage them to stretch their minds for Pete's sake! If this is a college student laptop, a communications suite (Mozilla/Thunderbird/Evolution, that sort of thing) and an install of OpenOffice will do pretty much anything they might require in their university career.
I sit the lead technician slot at a university help desk. I deal with the unwashed all day, every day, and I have to take crap for money. (I can't travel and freelance any more - arthritis has me geographically as well as physically handicapped.) ANY student, including Linux newbies, who shows up at my help desk with a Linux laptop gets at least a little bit extra assistance and some serious slack (if at all possible), just for TRYING not to be one of the herd.
(Some of the "I know EVERYTHING, see, look at my Linux, that PROVES I'm smarter than you" sorts of know-it-alls don't get the slack. They get the RTFM speech, and then help if they actually try to RTFM.)
The evaluation of the original query, the quality (lack thereof) of this laptop, so far everyone is likely correct. It's crap. Get something supportable, and if price is a real killer like it was for me, look into refurbed Inspirons, I can verify that the 7000 goes for fairly cheap and is Linux-friendly. There are a couple right now on the auction site,
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=48484&item=6730
536855&rd=1
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=48484&item=6730
536855&rd=1
I don't get any kick from anybody on e-Pay, caveat emptor, I just happen to like mine, for the price I paid.
(On the I-7000 I wound up with, Fedora Core 2 and 3 installed fine ootb, as did Debian, and SuSE; I tried them all, settled on Core 2 because of the driver support for my wireless cardbus card being already in the module list, and then compiled a custom kernel. It would have been fine without the custom kernel, but I like to fiddle with the options. Oh, and apt-get and yum solve tons of patching problems for the fresh cheeses who don't like or know how to compile their own.)
--
wwill
Friends don't let friends use Windows. (Unknown. Originally stated as the specific version, "Windows95" in the earliest postings I can discover. Probably came into general use via the Apple Macintosh community, about 1995.)
Linux -is- user friendly. It's just picky about who its friends are. (Unknown, popular on USENET and the origins so far have eluded me.)
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[ Reply ] |
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Windows = BAD = true statement, BUT | by Havoc | 2004-12-21 11:42:22 |
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Frosh-ness and LFS | by wwill | 2004-12-21 12:09:06 |
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LFS rocks... | by Havoc | 2004-12-21 15:10:31 |
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