Fed up with trying to keep a frankenstein Debian-testing + hyper-unstable-custom-debs system up-to-date with the latest security fixes, I just ditched it on my laptop in favor of Gentoo, the latest fad distro popular with the uber-geeks. You know, the kind of geeks who gotta show the next geek up by custom compiling every single package on his system and wouldn't be caught dead using a mainstream, candy-coated distro. Anyway, after getting past some initial problems, I got it installed and working almost flawlessly out of the box.
I've installed many flavors of Linux on several types of platforms, from x86 to alpha and I've not seen a vanilla, precompiled kernel for a distro have trouble with the most basic of IDE hard drives. However, the default 2.4 Gentoo kernel failed to work with the drive in my IBM G40 in any way—nothing but IO errors. Their 2.6 kernel did a better job but was a bit of a learning curve for me, as I'm used to the dark ages in Debian, where people running stable shy away from installing such things. Once that was cleared up, most of the bootstrap install consisted of waiting.
Almost everything worked out of the box for me with little trouble. BBDB was a minor exception to that, failing to install. My only other complaint about Gentoo is a seeming lack of a centralized method for wireless card configuration. I found a custom ebuild for some wireless-config package that worked well, but it seemed like a step down from Debian in that regard. Otherwise, everything seems to work well with little to no custom packages, including Mozilla, Blackdown, and Newsmonster.
What's up with that, biznitches? I've got all my packages custom compiled and optimized for my hardware.
I just put up compatibility report for GNU/Linux on the IBM Thinkpad G40.
I just ordered my new laptop through my employer today. w00t! I finally settled on an IBM Thinkpad G40 instead of the Thinkpad R40 SMB I had been thinking about. The new rig should ship sometime tomorrow.
I have to give it up to my employer here, this is a pretty sweet program. It amounts to a 2 year, 0% interest loan for computer hardware. If my employment ends, it all comes up due (deducted out of the final paycheck).
My employer offers a program to purchase computer hardware interest-free through paycheck deduction. They specify a few places I could order from, and one of them pcmall.com has the exact laptop I want, the IBM Thinkpad R40—pretty fucking nice. It would go great with a wireless internet connection.
I just found out that I'm not eligible for this program until a bit later this month, on the day that I have been with my current employer one full year. Kind of a disappointment but at least I'm motivated to shop a bit more.
Sometime in the future, I'm planning on buying a laptop because I travel so much. I need to carry a mobile office with me, so I can get stuff done. To go along with that, as any geek would point out, I need wireless internet access from anywhere.
The best solution at this point seems to be using Sprint's Unlimited Vision service with a USB data cable. Some of these phones provide an ACM ppp device you can use to dial out and get reasonable wireless access. Another solution seems to be getting a PCS Merlin C201 PCMCIA card.
For anyone else who is interested, here are a collection of links to get you started.
If anyone knows if the Sanyo SCP-8100 works with Linux, I'd like to hear about it.