I installed Mandrake 9.1. on my Thinkpad 600X because I am new to linux and had read Mandrake is the "most user friendly version of linux". However, after the install Mandrake never idenitied my trackpoint and my mouse was identified as "PS/2 standard mouse" eventhough its a PS/2 wheel mouse. The sound did not work until I followed the troubleshooting instructions. I also have a bad driver for my printer.
Surely there is a better "user friendly" distro of linux for laptops. Do you know of one?

Try suse next. Avoid redhat if possible unless you feel like recompiling the kernel a few times to get everything working.

huh? *looks to see if i did indeed install red hat on my laptop*
*confirms red hat is on laptop and wonders why everything is working since i never recompiled the kernel*

After all the problems I had with my laptop, I am surprised to here you had no problems, no tinkering. Is this correct?

Alright, to answer the question asked, The following are the most Linux-compaitble laptops.

If you want to find a laptop to install Linux on look for:
-Fujitsu
-Toshiba
-Vaio

And definately try to stay away from:
-Compaq
-Hp
-Gateway
-Dell

pretty much all other brandnames.

To Caeda: Actually, Redhat would probably work better out of the box than Mandrake, because it is more user interactive, unlike Mandrake which does "everything for you", and there's more room for the installation to miss something somewhere.

In Redhat, you input some information, and it will better direct your installation to go well.
That's why it asks you so many questions during install...a lot more than Mandrake.

Good job megaspaz, what laptop do you use bro?, tell us a little more about it,

zLinuxz

to "counter" what zlinuxz said, I have an HP laptop and it works out quite nicely with linux ...

though I might have just been damn lucky :-D I had no problems getting my hardware to work (except that damn radeon, might try later with the new drivers)...

but like I said, I can't compare with other HP laptops, so I may indeed have had some luck on my side

what laptop do you have, how old is it?,

pavilion ze4317 of a couple of months ...

I'm running Slack 9 on a ThinkPad 560. Had some trouble with the display driver (Trident Cyber) but it works now.

I can't do a lot with it mostly because I'm very limited by HD space (800 MB), but hooked up to my LAN and running Links, I can post to LQ with no problems

This works for my 770Z, should work for your 600 as well, ley us know if it helps you

logged iin as root

in Konsole opened kedit

opened the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file, changed this part:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
EndSection

to this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "on"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
Option "EmulateWheel" "on"
Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
EndSection

THIS DOES WORK!!! YAY!!!

The Trackpoint 3rd button does scroll as it should, although it scrolls extremely fast, anyone have any ideas on how to maybe slow it down

EDIT: its not really too fast...you just need to keep from getting too carried away with the trackpoint, it just take a little brush....remember it is not a joystick LOL!

P.S. if you figure out how to get the "click and scroll" to work let me know, this fix requires you to hold the third button while you scroll with the trackpoint

I tried that on Mandrake 9.0, Slackware 9.0 and Redhat 9.0 and it has worked everytime. I have settled on Redhat over Mandrake, I like the interface better and everything installs in the "standard" locations. I am new to this as well and that helps a lot. Mandrake seems to have its own directory tree that doesn't seem to fit anything when you try to install something. So when you try to do an install you have to spend hour looking for the location of the files to update/modify or whatever. with redhat, if I can't find it myself, I can do a search on google and usually find the location of the files

I'd also like to counter zlinuz slightly (no offense z)

but I have an older Gateway solo (2500 something) and it works amazingly well with linux.

(To be fair, it may be that newer gateways suck...but I wouldn't know...I'd love to be able to buy a brand new laptop *sigh*)

absolutely correct. running a dell inspiron 8100, 1 Ghz, 512 MB RAM running red hat 7.3. nary a tinker anywhere. like someone said before, maybe i'm just lucky.

Yes, anyone who got redhat one without a tinker is very lucky. It means you somehow found that rare laptop that had legacy parts.. such as a bios, and APM instead of acpi. Great for you. But, for most of the rest of us, were gonna get this legacy free crap, that needs all the little extra's compiled and enabled by default. And so, that's why I'll stick to recommending Suse and Mandrake.