Linux Friendly Laptop

[Hoso001]

Not sure if this goes here, but I think this is the place of best fit. Guys and Gals, i am shopping for a laptop. I am looking for some help on this. I would love to find a nice linux friendly laptop. The biggest thing for me is, that wireless works right out of the box, no tinkering, hoping, and trying to install ndiswrapper with no internet! Mostly gonna be used for, a little websurfing, word processing, and most likely watching a few movies and listening to music on. I am heading off to college this spring, thats why i need the laptop. :P

The budget is.. $400 to $600 No netbooks...

other hopefuls: Something with at least 2 Cores (Intel or AMD)
At least a 15 inch screen


I know, its a tight budget but any ideas or suggestions would be helpfull.

Thanks,

David

[Странник]

Most Acer laptops work out of the box

[Grifulkin]

I am not trying to be mean or anything just trying to ask a simple question. Why do so many of these treads keep coming up? Honestly, any laptop will work who cares if it is "linux friendly" if you buy a laptop you can more than likely get everything to work mostly out of the box. A few things that might not work right out of the box, the wireless card but most of the time that is an easy fix. So my question is why do people ask such questions because most likely they will buy a laptop with ******* on it and then change to whatever they want or dual-boot. I just get annoyed with so many people asking the same questions over and over and over again. You see this in the cafe at least once or twice a day. It's like just google reviews make an informed decision buy a laptop and then worry about getting linux to work on it, becuase 99% of the time it will work, with some work.

EDIT: Also, at the OP, HP makes great laptops and they have a compaq laptop for $399 just upgrade the processor to dual-core for say $25 and there ya go. They also have a nice option for dropping any service to save some money. And also, I am running #!Crunchbang on my laptop which is a Compaq and everything worked out of the box except the wireless, but that was just a simple
sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter and it was set-up.

[MelDJ]

system76? http://www.system76.com/

[Sealbhach]

Dell ship laptops with Ubuntu

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

so you can be quite certain that they're Linux friendly.

.

[bryncoles]

Dell ship laptops with Ubuntu

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

so you can be quite certain that they're Linux friendly.

.

Plus one to this. I bought a Dell Inspiron 1525n, with Ubuntu Pre-installed for around £500, about 2 years ago (running 7:10). Its never let me down (don't look at all my help threads where it's let me down...)

[riseringseeker]

system76? http://www.system76.com/

+1 for that! I dare someone to find a better supported linux machine!

[Sporkman]

My Acer 5100 (?) is supported well. Cheap & has a big screen.