Laptop for Gentoo

[G_Prime]

I've been gone a while, but I've decided to dive right back into Gentoo. I'm looking to replace my laptop and would like to run Gentoo on it exclusively. I've tried it several times with my current one, but I could never get all of the features to work properly. I want my new one too be a decent all around computer, good for a few games, some movies, nice HD capacity, proc, battery life, RAM, etc. Most importantly though, I want everything to function properly under Gentoo. Wireless networking, suspend and hibernate; absolutely everything. The less I have to do to set all these things up the better. So the question is, does anyone have any suggestions about what brands or models are likely to fit these requirements? Don't worry about price, it's a minor factor in my decision.
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I can do this. I am G-Prime

[forgotten1]

I've two Dell notebooks one is a CPxJ 650, the newer one an Inspiron 600M. I've had success installing Gentoo on both, although I've yet to configure everything fully on both yet. I have not identified an hardware gotchas with either one yet ...

Not to douse your enthusiasm, but with my limited experience with the Gentoo distribution it may not be a reasonable expectation to hope for 'doing less to set things up.' The new graphical installer does a good job of installing the distribution, but there is much left to configure.

I don't know of any Gentoo pre-installed laptops, although I do know a company out there is selling desktops with Gentoo pre-installed.

Good luck!

[G_Prime]

Perhaps I should clarify the part about the least possible effort to set up. I realize the Gentoo is a hands on, down and dirty distro. In fact that's why I like it so much. So it would probably be more accurate to say I don't want to do any excessive setup beyond what is normal for a gentoo system. I'd be using a routine, no-pitfalls setup on a desktop machine as a baseline for what would be a 'normal gentoo setup'. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions. I'm not a big Dell fan, but I won't rule them out just yet.
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I can do this. I am G-Prime

[Shucklak]

I have Gentoo running on my Inspiron 6000 and I have gotten just about everything to work perfectly after the basic installation.
After the initial installation, I only had to emerge ipw2200 for my wireless (which works wonderfully). I also had to play around with my xorg.conf for awhile to get the right screen resolution in X but it wasn't too much of a hassle.
The only thing that does not work is closing the lid(when its closed the backlight does not come back on), but I know a lot of people running Gentoo on laptops that do not have this problem.
All in all go for it. My guess is you will probably run into one or two problems that will have a very easy solution that you will either figure out or find it in the forums.
Good luck

[olivierva]

IBM Thinkpad.
I've installed gentoo on lots of different machines but my latest install was a breeze, everything worked straight away. The technical pdf manuals to replace parts are briliant!, it's very easy to get spare parts, recently replaced the plastics around the keyboard, and bought a spare battery from ebay (cheap), it's very easy to maintain.

It just feels right, you notice right away it's a properly engineered machine (excellent keyboard, good wireless (atheros) card), very well supported in the open source world (IBM does a lot of open source) and low maintenence and robust. Also if you look on ebay they are second hand worth quit alot, so if you want to sell it after a couple of years it's a save bet.

Also noticed that a lot that a lot of coders have thinkpads,
it's like designers have powerbooks and hackers have thinkpads

Cheers,

Olivier

[G_Prime]

Thanks a lot. I'll look into it. Which series of thinkpad was that? And are the other series just as good?. I'm also looking into getting a system from Emperor Linux. Anyone have any experiance with them?
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I can do this. I am G-Prime