On Wednesday 26 October 2005 10:04, James wrote: > John Jolet <john <at> jolet.net> writes: > > I need to have my company order me a new laptop, but obviously, i'll be > > putting gentoo on it. Does anyone have a recommendation for a very small > > 'n' light laptop known to be pretty much a slam dunk to get gentoo on > > (with sound and wireless, etc)? > > It's easy to get a machine that has updated (newer revisions) of critical > chipsets, which may or maynot work with linux drivers. > It's best to get a 2005.1 install CD and try to boot the machine up, before > purchase. Often I go to a big store and test things out before purchase. That's a great idea. I'll take my knoppix cd. I've never had that fail to work on a strange pc. > > You may what to ensure that critical tools 'lspci' and 'lshw' are on the CD > before trotting off to the store. Also, if the critical hardware is > usb basd, make sure you have the appropriate discovery tools on the CD > or a companion CD. Folks at Best Buy (USA) are always curious to let > me experiment with their windoz offerings. I've snagged a few gentoo > recruits this way. They offer to purchase the CD before I leave, and are > quite astonished when it is gifted to them. They look at Gentoo, as > a treasure revealing deep secrets about the hardware they are selling. > However, more often than not the discounted machine I'm looking > at has weird hardware or something that I do not like. For instance > using hdparm to profile the hard drive performance is another good > idea. Bargain bozes often have substandard HD, or wireless chipssets > that are mostly disfunctional, even under winblowz. > > Warning, I'm not sure why, but some of these aforementioned diagnostic > tools are not part of the standard gentoo install CD.....Let me know if > you find an install CD that has lots of hardware diag tools as > part of the CD. I never seem to get around to building a customized > CD, just for this purpose, but surely someone else has created > a boot/diag/install version of 2005.* ???? > > HTH, > > James
-- John Jolet Your On-Demand IT Department 512-762-0729 www.jolet.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
