[ILUG] machine advice

[John N S Gill]

> Hopefully not OT.
> I want to buy a machine, c. £1000 inc vat, for linux use (with a couple
> GB of win). Hopefully 17" mon, >=10GB hdd, 128 Mb ram, supported
> graphics (nothing fancy required). main use will be working from home
> (LaTeX) and some programming (python, maybe c).
> 
> first preference on experience is dell. gateway appear to give better
> value for money. I have a suspicion that quality is poor/variable. is
> there any advice?
 
Dell has the advantage of doing Linux pre-installed on some machines.
The main advantage of this being that you should, in theory at least 
get video/sound cards etc that are supported...

But then there is the sad tale of a Dell Laptitude laptop that was 
acquired for me by my office.   It came with RedHat 6.1 installed.  I 
decided to upgrade to 6.2 and it died in a heap when it started 
trying to probe the hardware.  The machine froze, in the end I left 
it for the battery to run down..

I haven't got in touch with dell support yet, not too optimistic 
about what if any help I'll get from them when I do.  I did see some 
comments re: problems with memory addresses for the pcmia stuff 
causing the autoprobe to fail.  If anyone has successfully installed 
6.2 on one of these things I'd be grateful for advice.

The IT manager where i work seems to have shares in M$, so he tends 
to latch getlinux support issues completely out of proportion, so a 
quick fix would come in most handy.  Come to think of it he gets most
things out of proportion, incoming e-mail has been switched off today
at his office due to some virus..