Talk to me about laptops and Ubuntu

[frank austin]

This seems like a good place to talk about laptops that can run Ubuntu.

I am in the market for a cheap (under $1000, preferably near the $500 range) laptop. I've been seeing plenty pop up on slickdeals/dealnews/techbargains lately, and it's got me thinking how much work I could do with a laptop. I'm sold on the concept.

I would also like a laptop that can run Ubuntu with a minimum of hassles. I know that Dell has a bunch of machines that they sell with Ubuntu pre-installed on them, which is awesome, but generally they seem to be a bit pricier than something I get off of a deal site. Can anyone chime in with an opinion as to whether or not this extra money invested is worth it?

Thanks!

[extarbags]

It's going to be hard to find an answer to this, but I believe Ubuntu is pretty widely compatible at this point. I suspect that your best bet at this point is to find a laptop deal and then double check to make sure Ubuntu will run on it.

[frank austin]

I've had a really hard time finding individual model compatibility. I have absolutely zero Ubuntu/Linux experience, and as soon as people start talking about the extra things they've had to do in order to get Ubuntu running on a specific laptop my head starts spinning.

[Udarnik]

Look here for laptops that have been tested with Ubuntu.

Wireless cards are often a problem. Take a look at this page to see people's experiences with different wireless cards.

Suspend/hibernate is usually a problem. External displays are often a problem. The laptop tests mentioned should hopefully help you steer around them.

[nixon66]

I've had pretty good success with Sony laptops and Ubuntu, with most everything working out of the box (webcam and finger print reader being the only two non-working things, but the webcam was fairly trivial to get working).

[EvilIdler]

Sound and fingerprint readers are generally the only big problems. There's usually at least a binary driver for Realtek, but you could try to extract information about the sound chips used before buying.

Any Intel wireless should work, and Atheros has been mostly opensourced. Realtek has been iffy in my experience, whether it's the built-in card (which IS a replacable component in most laptops), ExpressCard or USB.

[Fugitive]

Yeah, I had to grab and build the Realtek drivers for both the Ethernet and sound devices on my new system (not a laptop, but a mini-PC that uses the same integrated parts found in a lot of laptops). The Ethernet was somewhat working to begin with, but was reporting a lot of dropped packets.

Basically anything could be a problem when it comes to laptops and Linux, so your best bet is to do like extarbags says and Google for "ubuntu" and the particular models you might be interested in. If it's a reasonably popular model, somebody will have tried to stick Linux on it.

[frank austin]

Thanks for the links, Udarnik. Thanks everyone else for the advice, too. I'll see what I can turn up and report back anything interesting here.