# Laptop recommendations for Gentoo

## Emerged

Hello everyone!

I am currently in the market for a laptop and was wondering if anyone could recommend models which have better linux support (i.e. 90%+ hardware working). My main concern is WIFI. I have access to a free WIFI network at school and want to be able to use it without having to be in windows.

Thanks   :Very Happy: 

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## kwiqsilver

notebook support is pretty good these days. Most (if not all) use standardized components so they're actually easy to get working. On a typical modern notebook from one of the big brands, you should be able to get everything but the winmodem working, by just loading the right module. And with some you can get the winmodem to work with a bit of effort. Shop around for the best deal from dell, compaq, gateway, etc. and get that one. Just make sure it uses an ati or nvidia graphics chip.

I've heard that the centrino chipset doesn't play well with linux, but I've also heard that the -ac kernels support centrino.

If you get a pcmcia wireless, you can choose the brand and model for maximum compatibility. I recommend the netgear ma401. I installed gentoo on my compaq notebook last weekend and got wifi working on my ma401 in a matter of minutes by following a guide in these forums.

Another nice thing about using pcmcia wireless is you can get an 802.11g card for faster access on supported networks (and buy 802.11g for your home lan).

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## klarnox

If you get a laptop with integrated wifi be sure to do a little research first.  Most work fine with linux but there are some that do not work at all yet (intel based cards don't work yet, I believe).

Otherwise just about any laptop will work well.  I have a Dell Inspiron 5100 which works quite well for me.  It's a bit heavy to lug around, but I don't travel a whole lot and it works well for gaming.     :Cool: 

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## kwiqsilver

check out this company:

http://www.qlilinuxpc.com/products/laptops/index.html

(they're under the "Get Gentoo!" link at the top of most pages).

They'll put gentoo on your notebook (I'd assume configuring the hardware for you), not charge you the MS tax, and give $20 to gentoo.

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## Emerged

qli seems cool, but their prices translate bad in cunck bucks!!

I heard linuxant has a solution for centrino for around 19$. I would like a light laptop with 802.11g,....so many to choose, so little money to spend  :Wink: 

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## BiggJ

I have had major issues getting power management working ... if I were buying a new one, I would research either APM or ACPI support. That's the one thing I am missing, and it's such a vital part of running a truly portable laptop.

--J

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## hook

i'd have to say IBM.

most (usually all!) the HW IBM uses lately in whatever computer is made to run under linux too. and although their ThinkPads may look butt-ugly at the first sight, they have some great solutions, like the LED on top of the display to enlight the keyboard and display (for night-use).

also the word, at IBM itself, has it that they'll start selling (again) Linux pre-installed laptops

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## Ness

Make sure you don't get a laptop with a Radeon mobile graphics card in it by ATI, they don't supply linux drivers.  Quite a few HP Pavillions carry them, I'm pretty sure.

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## Emerged

biggj: I had read that if you use the ac-source?? (i think it is the acpi kernel snapshot) everything works fine. i think 2.6 kernel might have work well too....

hook: IBM??? they look sooooo dull, plus i hate their mice, but i will look into it

ness: DDR ATI MOBILITY RADEON  9000 AGP 4X ok???

I am thinking about the dell 600m and buying the linuxant hack for centrino. Whats stopping me (besides saving up the $$$) is that centrino is on 802.11b and i think i would like 802.11g.....

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## BiggJ

 *Emerged wrote:*   

> biggj: I had read that if you use the ac-source?? (i think it is the acpi kernel snapshot) everything works fine. i think 2.6 kernel might have work well too....

 

I am using 2.6.0-test11 ... although as of today things got really bad ...

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=112047

Stay away from EnPower Laptops (sold by PCClub) ...  :Sad: 

--J

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## hook

yea, on the pictures thinkpads look butt-ugly, but there's a few reasons why i'm beginning to like them:

- they've got some really engenious solutions

- if you look at the linux-laptops page, you can clearly see it doesn't cover them anymore, claiming there's been no problems with them for quite some time now

- yes, the guy at IBM slovenia did tell me the guys at IBM are thinking seriously to put linux-preinstalled laptops back on the line

- and well, at close they don't really look that bad ...also, being never "in" also means you'll never get "out"  :Wink: 

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## kwiqsilver

Ness, I have a radeon mobility chip, and it works great. Both ati and nvidia have binary only drivers, but I find the ones included in X to be more stable.

I've heard that -ac kernels support acpi too (and centrinos), so I'm going to try one out this weekend if I have time. I don't like having my notebook tell me there's no battery installed and the AC power isn't connected.

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## metacove

I absolutely love my emachines m5312. You can pick one up for around 1100 us dollars. Here are the basics:

beautiful widescreen display

mobile athlon 2400 xp

512mb ddr ram

60gb hard drive

integrated broadcom (94306) 54g wireless (Supported via linuxant-commercial and ndiswrapper-free)

3 usb 2.0

1 1394 firewire

radeon igp320 (kinda weak, but typical)

dvd/cdrw combo

The speed stepping works great. 3d support works under newer snapshots of xfree. I cannot suspend to disk yet.

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## pimo

 *Ness wrote:*   

> Make sure you don't get a laptop with a Radeon mobile graphics card in it by ATI, they don't supply linux drivers.  Quite a few HP Pavillions carry them, I'm pretty sure.

 

Ahhh, ive orderd a hp pavilion with a radeon mobility 64mb, am i not gonna be able to use it?

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## dancar

I'm on the process of installing gentoo right now, but I had slackware instaled on my laptop for about 6 months, and had my Radeon Mobility M6 working bealtifuly with graphic aceleration and everything. I ran Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 on Wine, and also ran Neverwinter Nights on it. And it was awesome.

but the thing is, I had to isntall the ati2 module at the time. I got it from the web (not included in Xfree 4.2) from a place called gatos something.

I don't know about Xfree 4.3, but I heard that you can get accelerated graphics with the radeon module.

I may try this next week.

But don't worry, Radeon Mobility works realy well, you just have to spend some time messing aroud with it.   :Cool: 

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## ZuBsPaCe

check out this site (links on the right side):

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/

it gives u usefull hints about hardware and drivers for specific notebooks. for me this site was quite helpfull to determine what hardware my laptop has, mostly because the manufacturers dont give much information about the components.

it's not written specifically for a gentoo distribution, but there are sometimes usefull hints about what kernel- or xfree-options are needed for your hw.

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## metacove

Radeon mobility's do work. You just have to be patient in following instructions to make them work.

You need to patch xfree, your kernel, and build a kernel module from the xfree src tree. Here is the patch you will need to apply:

http://bugs.xfree.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314

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## zfc-tinkerer

I have a Sager notebook (you can order them from www.sagernotebook.com) and I have everything but the winmodem working in linux that I've tried (including a Radeon M7, the mp3-player, the cdrw/dvd combo drive, and the battery monitor) though I haven't had to mess with pcmcia.  The model I have is a 12 lb monster, but they sell a variety of sizes.  Their tech support is great (they ask you when you want someone to call you rather than having you call and stay on hold).

One way they differ from any other notebook manufacturer I could find when I was looking is that they have at least one model with dedicated rather than shared video memory, which should help video performance.

The only real problem is that at least on the site, when you put together your computer (choose the processor speed, amount of memory, etc.) you have to choose a release of windows, and none is not on the list.  I know that the next notebook I buy is goint to be from them again (though I might try calling rather than using the web to see if I can convince them that I don't need windows)

On the ATI issue, I've had 3D acceleration working on my M7 without any kernel patches or anything like that, I just used xfree-drm.

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## Mace68

I have the Toshiba P25 laptop running Gentoo. Everything's working beautifully except the built in modem, which I havent bothered to try to configure yet.

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## cdunham

How about vendors? I'm looking to get a decently-priced laptop tat will run Gentoo and VMWare reasonably well, and don't want to pay the M$ tax. I'm thinking around $1k. This is for occasional travel and some testing.

There are a lot of "generic"/oem vendors out there, but I'm thinking with a laptop, a lot of corners can be cut, in a system without a lot of margin for error in things like temperature and power. Not to mention durability and weight.

Anyone have luck with a no-name brand, good or bad?

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## linedpaper

Are you able to get wirless lan working with the inspiron 5100?  Or anyone that has the dell truemobile 1300 (a+g).  Want to know if it will work without purchasing the driverant crap.

Tim

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## sandcrawler

Tinkerer,

You wish must have been granted.  I'm looking at getting a sager notebook (the 4080 Ultra)

NO OS is certainly an option now.  The price seems to be pretty reasonable considering the components installed and from the research I've done this actually appears to be a division of philips/magnavox... go figure..

EDIT:  That no os option appears to be reseller specific...  Sager direct appears to charge the windows tax.  My link above goes to one of the resellers offering the NO OS Option

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## KePSuX

That Sager 4080 looks like a Prostar laptop. Prostar makes OEM laptops a lot of vendors resell..(i.e. Alienware). I work at a vendor that resells (or used to) Prostars. They were fine for a little while but we have had a TON of problems with them in the last year. They have really awful tech support and make it harder to create a RMA than a Korean Motherboard manufacture. I'd highly recommend against getting anything originally manufactured by Prostar. Be careful guys!

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## trinitrotoluene

http://www.powernotebooks.com sells Sager laptops that have no OS installed.  Seems like good prices too.

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## srey

I'm running Gentoo on a Gateway 450 (non-Centrino, though, it's a 2.0 Ghz Pentium 4-M) with an 32MB ATI Radeon Mobility M6 card, and everything works fine.

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## shockme

Sager, Alienware, Hypersonic, Pro-star, Voodoo and a host of others are made by Clevo.

I recently snagged a great deal on an Alienware Area-51 on eBay.  All I can say is "Wow!".  This thing rocks. 

Gentoo installed without a problem.  Keeping the ATI drivers updated is too easy.  DVD, CD writing, and games all work.  Actually, to date, everything on this laptop is functional except for firewire, and that's only because I haven't had the chance to play with it.

I wouldn't recommend purchasing an Alienware new because they are too expensive.  But if you can get a good deal on one, I wouldn't hesistate.  This thing continues to blow me away every day.

I maintain a blow-by-blow account of any and all .config and XFree86 updates in my wiki, so if you're having problems, check there.  I might have already crossed that bridge.  If not, email me and I'll be glad to help where I can.

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## gurke

Hi!

i'd recommend Dell Inspiron 8600 with the gefoce graphics. i currently got evrything working but the suspend states (nvidia doesnt want to do that), but suspend to disk should work fine (installed, not tested, but heard id was working). the only thing that is a bit difficult is that you need the ndiswrapper, to make the wlan work. the same goes for the most of the other 11g wlan cards. you can also order it with the truemobile 1300 (11g), which also works with ndiswrapper. you can get good information about centrino and other laptops with linux here -> http://www.tuxmobil.org/centrino.html.

you shouldnt buy a toshiba laptop, because there are several known issues (e.g. keyboard gives doubled characters under X). trust me, i owned one   :Wink:   i assume it didnt change, but didnt really inform me anymore about it, since i got a dell now.

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## johnmc

My Toshiba 5205-S703 is working great with Gentoo. I haven't run into anything that stumped me hardware-wise, and it seems there is a lot of support in the Linux development community for Toshiba, and also for Dell.

Good luck!

-John

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## mstrobel

I'd definitely recommend IBM.  Both at home and at work, I've owned/used a total of six ThinkPads, and I've loved every one of them.  My latest is a T41p--very well equipped, albeit rather expensive.  The T-series offers what I'd consider to be the perfect blend of power and portability (at a mere 1" thin).  I'm strictly running Gentoo, and everything works well for the most part, less an ACPI problem here and there, all of which will hopefully get worked out in short time.  The IBM 802.11a/b/g card works fine with the madwifi-driver eBuild installed, and I would assume that the Centrino-labeled variants work as well as any other notebook featuring the Intel WiFi adapter (e.g. you're stuck using NDISWRAPPER until Intel releases a native Linux driver).

Cheers,

Mike Strobel

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## MaGuS

I recomment the Toshiba M30. Everything is working fine, but for the WiFi you need the linuxant warper or the gpl one. But Intel wants to publish a driver for linux. ACPI runs great, you need some script, but it work like a dream!

Best regards,

Magnus

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## Shopko

I very highly recommend the Compaq Presario X1000.  It runs Gentoo wonderfully and even the Centrino wireless card is supported by ndiswrapper now (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net).

There is an active online community that supports this particular laptop, and there is even a Linux forum for those of us who wish to run something other than the included XP Home.    :Cool: 

Check it out at http://www.x1000forums.com

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## sireyessire

 *gurke wrote:*   

> Hi!
> 
> i'd recommend Dell Inspiron 8600 with the gefoce graphics. i currently got evrything working but the suspend states (nvidia doesnt want to do that), but suspend to disk should work fine (installed, not tested, but heard id was working). the only thing that is a bit difficult is that you need the ndiswrapper, to make the wlan work. the same goes for the most of the other 11g wlan cards. you can also order it with the truemobile 1300 (11g), which also works with ndiswrapper. you can get good information about centrino and other laptops with linux here -> http://www.tuxmobil.org/centrino.html.
> 
> you shouldnt buy a toshiba laptop, because there are several known issues (e.g. keyboard gives doubled characters under X). trust me, i owned one    i assume it didnt change, but didnt really inform me anymore about it, since i got a dell now.

 

I do agree with you inspiron 8600 and everything works perfect except suspend state and wireless (i haven't tested the truemobile 1300 yet)

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