[wellylug] What new laptop < $1000 is compatible with Ubuntu 8.04

[Jethro Carr]

On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 19:27 +1200, Carl Turney wrote:
> Could any of you who are coming on Saturday, with personal experience in
> making a currently-available lower-end laptop work with Ubuntu, please
> point me in the right direction?  THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

No luck from me in this area, haven't brought budget laptops in ages.

These days most systems work fine, the only issues are usually due to
something like the modem/wifi/bluetooth.

My suggestion is find some cheap machines that you like and find out the
chipsets of the wifi/modem/whatever and see what the support is like -
post the chipsets here if you like and I or someone else can say whether
it's likely to work or not.



> (BTW...  I certainly don't want one of those non-hard-disk extremely cheap
> and tiny notebooks.)

Why not? You may have some good reasons, I'm interested.

They are actually a very good option. Low cost, pre-configured/installed
Linux and all the hardware just works out of the box.

The disadvantage is that they aren't particular grunty and the screen
resolution is a bit low for my liking.


The new Asus 900 models have a lot more power than the older 700 series
and a 16GB usable SSD space.

Asus Eee PC 900 Notebook, Celeron M 353 900 MHz, 1GB RAM, 20GB HDD, 8.9"
TFT, No optical drives, WLAN, Linux, Black - $700

See:
http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=365047


If you're worried about the screen/keyboard being a bit small, for that
price you have $300 to spend on an external display/keyboard/mouse, and
when travelling with your laptop you have a small, lightweight machine
to carry about.

If you're never had an ultralight laptop before, it's amazing how much
of an improvement it will make.

I own a Toshiba Libretto U100 laptop - it's a proper laptop (ie: not a
netbook) in a sub-1kg very small formfactor - had it since 2006 and love
it.

I'd never go back to the days of lugging heavy 2-3kg laptops around the
place. (for details about the Libretto U100 see:
http://www.jethrocarr.com/index.php?cms=libretto_u100)



> If they don't have an internal NZ-compatible dial up modem, do they have a
> serial port?
> 
> If they don't have a parallel port, will they talk to my Lexmark E230
> through my parallel to USB converter?

A lot of new machines (especially laptops) no longer have either serial
or parallel interfaces.

I believe your printer should work with a parallel to USB converter,
although I'd be surprised if your printer didn't have a socket for
connecting it via USB directly.

Any laptop sold in NZ which has a dialup modem will be "NZ-compatibile"
but whether

If you have a laptop without an NZ-compatibile modem, if it has a PCMCIA
slot, you could stick in a hardware dialup modem in there.



> Can I successfully connect my PS2 keyboard and mouse via a USB converter?

Yes, you can get USB to PS2 adaptors - I have a few, which gives me 2
PS2 ports on the one adaptor.



> Is it difficult to swap hard disks in the thing?

How difficult is difficult? You can swap the hard disks of any laptop,
but unless you open it up it's hard to say how much work would be
involved in doing that.

Not something you'd want to do on a regular basis, but it can always be
done. :-)



regards,
jethro

-- 
Jethro Carr
www.jethrocarr.com/index.php?cms=blog
www.amberdms.com
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