Laptop recomendation

Sagerion · n00b Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 60

I thinking of replacing my current laptop averatec 3200. Currently the battery is on it's last leg and the power connector is finicky. The laptop has definately gotten well used.

I'm looking for a laptop that will obviously be Gentoo friendly hardware meaing:
power management works
wifi works (prefered to have a native driver)
and support for some sort of accelerated video (simple games)

I like the 12" variety notebooks, something that is the size of a notebook and easy to carry around.

And here is the tuff part, I would like to have +6hrs of battery life.

I'm mostly going to be surfing the net, writing papers, matlab, few simple games, video play back, etc.

Also I don't care to spend much more than ~$1000.

The 2100 series averatec come close to meeting the requirements except on the battery life.

Any suggestions or am I looking for something that doesn't exist?

e-ipi · Apprentice Joined: 23 Aug 2005 Posts: 192

Hmm... that is tough. 12", 6hrs of battery for USD$1,000? I guess it's a question of what's closest. An Apple iBook? Asus z33a or s5a?

Sagerion · n00b Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 60

Well I guess the other criteria would be NOT a apple. I can't stand the 1 giant button for the mouse.

I'm not familar with the Asus z33a or s5a, I'll have to check those out.

Sagerion · n00b Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 60

http://www.geared2play.com/store/products/laptops/asus/z33ae/z33ae.htm

Wow I think I may have found a notebook that fits with out a windows tax to boot!

Anyone know if 7200rpm drive will hurt the battery life at all? or would it be better to just stick with a standard 5400rpm drive?

e-ipi · Apprentice Joined: 23 Aug 2005 Posts: 192

demogog · n00b Joined: 26 May 2005 Posts: 16

Hmm... What about IBM Thinkpad? X series? They are 12". The new models with Dual Core is very expensive, but something like X30 or X31 with first Centrino would around your price. With Thinkpad you get one of the best computers with very nice linux compatibility.

QuietStorm · n00b Joined: 02 Aug 2004 Posts: 44 Location: Texas

I just recieved my Averatec 2100 series laptop last night.
The first thing I did was boot it up till it go to the Windows EULA screen, then i rebooted into my gentoo live cd and killed all partitions including the restore partition.
Then after installing gentoo, when I reboot Grub hangs when loading.
I belive this is an issue with the bios and it not being able to see the recovery parition.
So after messing around with it for a while I threw in a Winz0r Xp disk which got to the "Setup is inspecting your hardware" then goes to a black screen. So i tried a Winz0r XP 64 disk which did the same thing.
So I tried seperate Winz0r disk. same result
So I tried a Winz0r XP Media Center edition disk. Same result
Im back to working on gentoo again as I would rather have linux then windows anyway. But grub is still being percarious.

This is such a beautiful laptop with a 64x processor wich is hard to find, but I'm starting to wonder why I didn't get an ASUS.

I will post back if I'm able to get grub to work. Any suggestions are appricated.