I've recently decided I'd like to buy a laptop to use strictly for programming. I'd like to put slackware on it, but I'm still rather new to linux and I'm afraid if I dished out $800 for a laptop and there was some bit of hardware that wasn't easy to get working I'd have wasted a lot of money. Is the hardware that comes with most laptops typically well supported? Has anyone here used one that I could get for around $800 that they have experience with?

The most recent versions of Linux (I've tried, Vector, Fedora, and Mandrake) run well on my Ashton Digital 2.0Ghz Celeron w/ Radeon 7500 and my KDS Valiant 700Mhz w/ Trident CyberBlade Video. I've had problems with older versions of XFree86 not working with the Mobility Radeon.. but that was a year or so ago..

I would suggest dual booting Linux and Windows.. you get the best of both worlds

Well, I've got a duel boot on my desktop.

How do integrated graphics cards usually do? I'm not concerned about how well it runs games because with a budget as small as mine there's no way I'll get something nice.

I have a T41 ThinkPad, running Slackware 10.
And it runs perfectly, supend-to-ram, suspend-to-disk (swsusp2), graphics, wifi.. everything works.

/Nico

I just bought a Dell Inspirion 1000 (which is perfect if you are looking to spend ~$800.00). I'm dual-booting slackware 10.0 and windows xp. If you've ever used an older version of slack you will be AMAZED at how far it has come. It detected all of my hardware right out of the box, and I even had my net connection working by the end of the install.

So my suggestion is slack 10.0 and a dell inspirion 1000.
I have had no problems at all. DVD's play great (haven't tried cd-burning yet, but I'm 99% it will work without too much work), sound worked instantly with alsamixer, etc, etc.

The laptop itself, while far from top of the line, runs xp and slack blazingly fast. It's not a gaming machine, per se, but it is well suited for game/application development, IMHO.

- Stephen