suggestions for cheap laptop?

From: foo (foo_at_bar.net)
Date: 11/14/05 

Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 05:27:25 GMT

There seems to be a lot of cheap ($500-700) laptops around these days,
but it's hard to figure out which ones will work with OpenBSD. Today I
was checking out the $599 Acer Aspire 3003LCI deal at Circuit City, but
they wouldn't let me boot an OpenBSD cdrom, and they have a 15%
restocking fee, so I don't want to take chances... I had to sit there
and make notes based on the drivers listed in the windoze control panel
to get an idea of what was under the hood, and only to find out that the
wifi is broadcom (sucks!) and the SiS M760GX video chipset sucks with
only shared memory available.

So I'm posting here in the hopes that someone will be able to point me
in the right direction. The laptop list in the "hardware platform" of
openbsd.org is fairly limited in scope and doesn't cover the latest
models, at least not the ones in the price range I'm considering.

My needs are fairly simple:
- decent cpu, nothing fancy (900 MHz celeron is okay)
- 256 MB RAM, or better
- 40 GB 5400rpm disk, or better
- working 10/100 LAN
- working video chip (800x600@16bpp, or better)
- 15-inch LCD
- working audio, USB 2.0 and pcmcia

Nice to have, but not necessary:
- working wifi
- working modem

Any experiences, suggestions, etc. along these lines will be greatly
appreciated! I've never owned a laptop before and I don't want to dive
in without making sure it works well with my favorite OS.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Apple makes Macs run Windows XP
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  • Re: xircom realport re-100
    ... I'd really like to use OpenBSD on my laptop, ... > network access...I'll have to use FreeBSD or Linux of some sort. ...
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