On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 01:34 +0530, Sanjay Arora wrote:
However, I am in a fix now. I need to buy a high end laptop, (4 GB RAM, 200 GB HDD, 17" Screen, Touchpad, Integrated Webcam and Full Multimedia, so that the system can double as a Personal Entertainment Device High End Audio/Video on long trips). I will need to run Centos & Windows virtualized with Xen or some other hypervisor, for my some of my office applications
If it's CentOS you're interested in, you're on the wrong list. But I bought a fairly new Asus laptop at the end of last year, and just about everything works on it (haven't tried firewire, the multi-card reader only manages to read SD-RAM cards, the webcam isn't usable). Using Ubuntu on the same laptop, the webcam does work.
Before I bought the computer, I spent quite a lot of time researching the models that I could buy locally. What hardware they had, and what was known to work or not work on Linux. I'd say that the main things to look for would be:
Graphics chipset Wireless chipset Card reader chipset Type of webcam Audio chipset (not sure if this is the big problem it used to be)