i've got this dell cpia from a gov't (usa) auction:
pentium ii, 20g new hard drive (ebay), neomagic256 audio/video, the dread cmd646 ide chipset, texas instruments pcmcia (yenta socket), .... a c dock ii (also ebay) with media bay, aic7xxx scsi, and 3com tornado nic. all told, less than $400us invested including rh9 and s&h. decent.

trouble spots:
adsl/verizon - finally! analog man (partner) blindly rescued me here and i still am not sure how
the sound playback pointer is invalid, tho i can get around this
the parallel port - need epp mode for the paride subsys cd-rw devices (specifically microsolutions backpack); bios rev a15 only offers bi-directional, ecp, & ps/2. i probably forgot to put the bra on my head or missed something during the critical invocation of _mount magic_ ...
i can't get the backpack cd-rw to mount (docked or not) therefore i can't burn the fedora core iso images for use on the other 'books the gov't dumped. (e.g., dell inspiron 3000 pentium ii, no cdrom, no nic; micron transport xke, pentium mmx with cdrom (two of these puppies))

the linux experience here has been and continues to be educational (my favorite!). i'm a newbie _still_ after a year with the rh9 media set.

next lesson: plip

Gateway 200STM with SuSE 9.1 Pro and everything but ACPI worked on initial install, even the dockstation (It does not do hotplugging well though). I also used to have a Gateway 600YGR that worked just fine with both SuSE 9.1 Pro and Mandrake 10.0.

Yah...

Just posted a thread in this forum...

So I got a laptop (top of my head.. the specs are)
Toshiba Satellite 2435-s255
40 G HD
512 Ram
Nvidia Geforce4 Go with 32 M
AC97 sound, karmon hardon speakers
Lan, Modem, SD Drive, CDRW/DVD

I have winxp pro sp2, and dual booting linux - had slack 10 but am trying out progeny debian 2.0....

never had much trouble installing linux on my laptop... was pretty much testing to see which distro worked best for me... about the only problems that i have with linux are:
1) sound .. intel8x0 card... it would work during some installs... and definitely not after a kernel compile....
2) update and dependecy hell with swaret/slapt-get especially if u include the linuxpackages.net repo...

Also got two other linux box.. slack 10 and fc2.. but havent' touched them for months.... THink once slack 10.1 comes out.. I'll just switch them all to SLACK box....

larva828

I have a Compaq Presario 722EA ( presario 700 family ) ( duron 1.1ghz 256Mo ram, 20Gb HD and a VIA apollo chip )

I installed a slackware 10, but I have upgrade kernel to 2.6.9 recently because 2.4 kernels are very bad for this laptop.

ACPI on 2.6.X series seems to work perfectly.
Sound is OK.
The s3 Twister video card ( prosavage4 kn133 ) works fine with XOrg 6.8 and DRI is enabled but I just get 148 FPS at glxgear :/ ( 60FPs when DRI isn't enabled)

The modem is a Connexant and doesn't have issues.

Ran a Dell C600 with RH7 a few years ago, dual boot with W2K, no dramas.

Just installed Gentoo on a Dell D800 dual boot with WinXP, so far so good.

I Have a HP OmniBook 4150 that I just loaded Xandros 2.4 (Mag. Coverdisk).
I was pleasantly surprised when I installed the Os it all worked perfectly even my Linksys WCF12 CF card that is in a CF to PCMCIA adapter. This is too good to be true, Well.. nah..It's LINUX. Life is good indeed.
P.S. Thank you all for sharing with us all your experiences both the good & bad ones.

I have a dell c860 with slackware 10.1 installed. I also had slack 9.1 installed on the same machine as well as a dell inspiron 4100. Both dual booted with WinXP. Wireless with the orinco drivers and true mobile card perfect out of the box. ACPI (although i never took time to get full functionality, buttons, etc...) works great. The only thing that did not work without effort was Alsa but removing OSS drivers from the blacklist got it going [OSS] until I had time to work on ALSA.

Good luck

Tom

New laptop last month:

Toshiba Satellite M35x--works with Slack, Ubuntu and SuSE.

HP Pavilion ZV5323A

Nvidia 420 Go Graphics - works fine with the Nvidia 6211 driver, not the newer ones. Display 1280x800

Agere AC'97 modem - works with the smartlink modem driver and a bit of google jiggery-pokery

Netgear WG511T wireless card - works with the madwifi driver and google hunt to end all to get the PCMCIA to recognise it. (When I say it's working, it's recognised and scanning for networks, won't be able to try it out for sure 'till next time I'm at an airport or somewhere)

All and all, everything works, now (Although I haven't bothered trying to get scrollwheel thing working on the touchpad as it doesn't bother me.)

Gateway Solo 1450LS Celeron 1.3 256mb 40GB Intel ethernet
Slackware 10.2 Running KDE at 1024x768

Installeed Slackware 10.2 on it 2-3 months ago, and no problems

Averatec 3200. Tried to install linux on it all year with no success.

PCLinuxOS 0.92 installed without a hitch and works perfectly - even wireless.

I have a apple ibook G3 700Mhz, you know one of those little white ones.

I first started with installing debian woody and I had all sorts of problems, upgrading to sarge seemed to make them worse. The boot up kept losing the HD and all kinds of random problems. Also I never did get xfree86 to work. It did not like my ATI mobility video card and no matter how many times I reconfigured the x-server I could never get the screen to run anything but the command line. I am a real newbi so half the problem might have been me not knowing what I was doing.

I almost gave up on linux but decided to start over and go with ubuntu 5.10 for powerpc. Man what a difference! It found all my devices and even the apple buttons work like the screen brightness/darkness and the eject button. No more paper clip!

Now running Gnome on it just fine. At only 128Mb of RAM it takes almost 5 years to boot up and I have a bit of a wait when I start programs but once they are up they run actually pretty fast. I have yet to figure it out but for some reason firefox runs much faster on this machine than my IBM 1400Mhz XP-pro machine. I have no clue why.

Still need to add some RAM but other than that the apple runs well on linux.

I have a ACER ACPIRE 1522WLMi 64 processor 3000+
60 GB HDD 512MB DDR RAM


Running Ubuntu Dapper 6.06


-----------------------------------
http://www.antarctica-rbak.nl/ubuntu/acer_aspire.php

I'm running an ARMADA 7730MT.
166 Mhz Pentium
140 Mb of System Ram
80 Gb Hard drive
roughly a 50/50 split on the hard drive with windBlows 98/Debian
kernel image 2.4.27-2-386 was chosen by the DEBIAN install

Can I replace this with the 2.4.27-3-386 image?

It looks like alsa needs the 3 version to work correctly.
as I can't get any sound out of it now...

Any help configuring the sound would be appreciated.

BTW, I DID put the 2.4.27-3-386 image on and tried to load alsa, but it appears that there are STILL dependencies for alsa-source that are NOT on the 14 CD Debian Distro. WTF is up with that? ( yes, I have the UPGRADE CD's too...)

No, I am NOT a neophyte on UNIX, just a neophyte on LINUX. UNICOS and SYSVR4 was my speed along with SUN/OS. We didn't have any decent package installers in those days
and I set up UUNET communications BY HAND.