Good Linux Laptop?

[jfall]

I have never owned a laptop before, but have been thinking about getting one for a while now. I am looking for a slim/lightweight/stylish laptop that has good linux compatibility. Gaming will be very minimial, this will be used mainly for work which generally requires me to have 20-30 shell's, and 10-15 browser windows plus a few misc applications open at a time. I think a lower clocked mobile CPU would do the trick, somewhere around 1.5-2ghz and 512-1024mb of ram and I would need a wireless NIC

I know quite a few co-workers with mainly compaq laptops that seem very incompatible with linux, mainly the integrated sound and sometimes the wireless NICS. I'm looking for a laptop that has a more popular chipset.

Anyone have any recommendations on a laptop that I should look at? I'm thinking about spending around $1,800 but could go higher. Is there something else I am missing? what else should I look at when buying a laptop, battery life, some type of security etc.?

Thanks

 

[Zelmo3]

Everything on my E-Machines M5312 works out-of-the-box with SuSE 9.0 except for 3-D video and the wireless ethernet. I got the wireless working by buying a license for Linuxant's driverloader module, and just use a better suited computer for gaming.
It looks like Cisco makes their own Linux drivers for wireless, so look for that. Aironet, Prism, and Orinoco chipsets also have working drivers.
E-Machines makes some pretty impressive laptops for pretty good prices, with P4, Athlon, and AMD64 models currently available. Whatever you get, I would recommend buying from a local retailer with a good return policy. I got a 3-year service warranty from BestBuy when I bought mine, and ended up replacing my laptop 3 time just in the first two days for defects. I finally ended up with a good one with no hassle and no waiting.

 

[drkavnge99]

I have an IBM T21 laptop and have run Red Hat 9 on it without any trouble with drivers. With that said IBM is big in supporting linux right now even helping out with lawyers in the fight against SCO. Most IBM laptops should have driver support given it isnt' the latest and greatest model.