I''m probably going to be getting a laptop within the next 3 months or so, and I was curious if anyone has any recommendations? My budget is 1600$ tops not including S&H, though of course, less is better The laptop is going to have to last me through school for another 2 years (computer science...yup, I''m taking the plunge and going back to school at the ripe old age of 31), so I''d like it to have a bit of life in it. A dedicated video card would be nice...but it seems like all laptops now have ATI mobility radeons, and I''m not sure how well Xfree86 handles these. I''d like to be able to putz around on Blender on my laptop (and I might even get Realsoft 3D 4.5 if I have enough money after paying tuition, since students can get the Linux version for only 200$), so it''d be nice to have 3d acceleration via DRI or preferably directly through hardware accelerated opengl (whether Mesa or OpenGl itself). I''ve heard that laptops can be a bit more picky about linux than desktops, so I''m curious what kind of laptops people have succesfully installed linux on? I''m currently using Mandrake 9.1, though I''ve used Suse alot before, and I''ve toyed with Slackware 8.1 and Gentoo 1.2. I''m probably just out of the newbie stage with linux, so I''m comfortable with doing things without gui''s. But I''m willing to use any distro of Linux. Any advice would be very appreciated.

I have an IBM T-30 and I''m running SuSE linux and my friend has one and is running Mandrake. I think I know a few people who are running FreeBSD on T-30s but I''m not 100% sure on that one. I think you can get a T-30 for around $1600-1700 now as well, so it fits into your proposed budget.

go with dell, i got a laptop from there like 3 months ago. they usually put on *really* good deals.

if u dont want a radeon, they also can put in a geforce 4 go in it.

im sure u could one of those working fine with linux.

i dont have this problem cuz i have a desktop for linux (debian), and use windows xp on my laptop.