Linux and off the shelf laptops

[baggyeyes]

My seven yr old PC is behaving badly. It freezes in the middle of a loong yum operation, or even in the middle of switching between text apps.

I could try to get it repaired, but as I have dialup (through Airport), getting updates makes me cranky.

So I'm looking at off the shelf laptops, because I can't afford anything on a credit card.

What kind of laptops do you use, and with what distro? I've heard HP is awful, yet on a Fedora Planet entry, a developer said he'd just installed F15 on a new HP, with no problems. I've also noted others using Acer. Lenovo is out of my league, money-wise.

So, out of a mixture of curiosity and part of my on-going mission to get an idea of what is possible, what do you use in laptops? What distros are you using, and were there any gotchas at first?

Edited to add
I'm mostly curious about what kind of hardware people are using; Laptops DEFINITELY, but if you want to talk about your desktop rig and what you've put into it, go for it!


My computer is a Lenovo 3000 J Series. I have an old Nvidia card GEForce 6200, Old Sound Blaster Live! MP3 that still gives great sound - provided I get rid of Pulseaudio. No wireless, it connects via Ethernet to the Airport, which is controlled by an iMac. (not mine).

Comments

[owlectomy]

I've been running Ubuntu on my HP netbook (a Mini 1030) for 2 years now with almost zero problems. (Almost? The hinge on the laptop broke, I sent it in for a repair with a note to pretty-please NOT reformat my hard drive, but they did just that. I find the build quality on HPs pretty abysmal.) I think I had a tiny problem getting wifi set up but that was pretty easily resolved.

I'm also dual-booting Ubuntu on my Dell desktop. Just to warn you in advance, Dell computers now ship with a proprietary program called DataSafe, which is supposed to keep your data safe in the event of, say, a catastrophic hard drive failure, but which also messes around with how the computer boots, in such a way that it cannot coexist on a dual boot system (unless you do a whole new install and put GRUB in a different directory).

SO, if you want to dual-boot, I think it's easiest if you uninstall DataSafe first.

(All this happened last year, and I'm kind of a n00b so I didn't even completely understand the technical part of it then, but I can dig up a link if you need.)

[baggyeyes]

Thanks for the heads up about both models!