[ale] dell laptops

[Bjorn Dittmer-Roche]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, linux wrote:

>
> I am looking over the Dell Financial Laptops on Ebay store.
>
> I know nothing about Dell only Toshiba (8100 specificially)
> so can anyone recommend or point me to some reviews of
> the Dell line. This will not be my primary Laptop, just a secondary
> that will have to run both Linux and Xp.
> Thanks

RH is much friendlier towards dell laptops than debian. Good idea to use a
new kernel with "dell laptop" options compiled in or, for example, your
machine will crash when unplugging the power cable. Even with RH 8.0 that
someone else installed, I completely froze the machine within five minutes
when I tried to switch to a virtual console!

I have heard some BIOSes (and not necessarily the old ones) are buggy,
though I can't say I have any experience where my dell laptop had a
problem that I knew was the BIOS.

My inspiron 8100 took forever to get things working on debian. Even
knoppix failed to recognize the screen resolution! If you do use debian,
I'm happy to send you all my config files.

So bottom line is it works well when it works but some distros/kernels
work better than others and you may have to invest a little time.

good luck!

	bjorn