there's lots of sites dedicated to giving linux help to existing laptop owners, but i'm backwards. i'm looking to buy a laptop, and i'm looking for one that will have good linux hardware support.

the biggest question is this:

what mobile video chips have hardware accelerated linux drivers?

ati and nvidia, i know, any others?

i wanna buy an older laptop, probably pre-geforce20go

linux certified (http://www.linuxcertified.com/) sells a model for $500, but i'm not looking for anything pre-installed or with a warranty, or probably even that new. well, maybe about those specs.



i'd likely be ebaying for said laptop.

back to the main question,

are there any video chipsets of this age with available hareware-accelerated linux drivers?

i don't even know when ati hopped in the mobile market, perhaps they had one.

thanks.
-john

Why exactly would you be avoiding a 2go style card? Seems to be you would want the best bang for your buck all the way around. Also what type of money are you looking to spend? Low cost laptops are becoming a trend and they are definately best bang for your buck.

The Lindows pc comes with Lindows pre-installed(debian distro) and only runs $777 at sub300.com.


There's also the new emachine for just barely over a grand($1149 after rebate). The emachine uses more or less desktop parts so based on what I know it should be more or less linux ready(possibly the video chipset being the only issue).

And lets not forget apples offerings. The ibook comes in at only $999 and has distro's pretty much written specifically for the hardware with yellow dog and mandrake ppc.

Last but not least is the Averatec laptops. Apparently from what Ive read this company has been building pc's in Japan for a very very long time and have just recently opened a US branch. They have a very attractive Athlon based laptop, the 3150H, for $919. Again most of the hardware is not unlike it's desktop brotheren so it should work well with linux. As if that isnt enough Avertec says(on the front page) that they are going to start selling they're own refurb laptops.

At prices like those I honestly dont see why you would want to try to get less for your money by not wanting to go with some form of a hardware texture and lighting enabled video chip. If your really head strong about it then I'd suggest looking into finding something with an nvidia chipset. The reason for this being the historically bad support for linux that ati has shown so far. Problem is when it comes to laptops ATI more or less has dominated that market untill just the last few years. In fact they arguably still lead the market with things like the mobile radeon 9000.

Hopefully some of this info gives you an idea of whats going on with laptop hardware and how linux is going to act. Unfortunately finding linux drivers that will provide 'any' sort of acceleration under linux is going to be tough unless it's nvidia.

i posted something similar on a couple of forums, but this time i forgot to mention:

i'm looking to buy a used laptop, old, and sub-$500.