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kingmoffa
July 21st, 2010, 10:27 AM
Hello all,

Im starting a new job soon and my new employer will buy me some hardware :)

I was going to get a dell after having a ubuntu desktop from them - but after visiting

http://www.dell.co.uk/ubuntu

"Shop here for ubuntu laptops" I could not find any. So I contacted their UK support via email and got told they only sell winblows 7.

So now it seems I need to get an unsupported laptop and probably register as a windows sale.

Im after a portable laptop with a high res screen which rules out most netbooks and doesnt cost a silly amount of money.

Any recommendations from the community?

clanky
July 21st, 2010, 10:51 AM
What do you call a silly amount of money?

I have an HP pavillion dv7 which runs nicely in both Win7 and Fedora around about the £700 - £800 mark IIRC.

christiansale
July 21st, 2010, 10:54 AM
You don't give us much to go on, just saying "relatively good specs". Relative to what? Your old desktop? Some other machine?

If you give us an idea of what you are going to use it for, you may get some more responses. Have you looked in the October sub-£500 laptop thread for some ideas? Unless you want to do gaming one of those will probably do for you.

Johnsie
July 21st, 2010, 11:08 AM
Asus laptops are pretty cheap and usually of decent quality.

I would check out the usual suspects:

http://dabs.com
http://www.misco.co.uk

Vincentlaborant
July 21st, 2010, 11:19 AM
Some of the posts in this thread can be handy:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9616453&posted=1#post9616453

also take a look at the posts slightly above it. I discussed some hardware compatibility issues/ challenges (depends on how you look at it) on networking and graphics. Sound is not a problem most of the time, but Creative sound card are a real pain in the *** on Windows (but sometimes work out off the box on Linux).

vijayaprasadunix
July 21st, 2010, 11:20 AM
cost services

kingmoffa
July 21st, 2010, 11:41 AM
I did reply telling my ideal specs about 10mins ago, forum prompted saying I had double posted and now its gone. Oh well.

Basically I'd like a 13inch laptop with good keyboard for web development. SSD would be nice as would nvidia graphics. CPU / HDD / Optical drive and other things are not important.

Price wise - not really any more than £1000.

Just spotted the Dell Adamo - £1099. Anyone running ubuntu on one of these?

simosx
July 21st, 2010, 01:00 PM
Hello all,

Im starting a new job soon and my new employer will buy me some hardware :)

I was going to get a dell after having a ubuntu desktop from them - but after visiting

http://www.dell.co.uk/ubuntu

"Shop here for ubuntu laptops" I could not find any. So I contacted their UK support via email and got told they only sell winblows 7.

So now it seems I need to get an unsupported laptop and probably register as a windows sale.

Im after a portable laptop with a high res screen which rules out most netbooks and doesnt cost a silly amount of money.

Any recommendations from the community?

There is an Ubuntu UK mailing list,
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk

and they discuss these issues in detail.

I remember a recent discussion about Dell still selling laptops but not showing them on the Dell Ubuntu page. Which is quite silly.

pinguy
July 21st, 2010, 01:46 PM
This is pretty cheap and will work great with Ubuntu.

Presario CQ61-417SA: £359.00
http://tinyurl.com/2b3ufqr

The only thing I would get for it would be 2 more Gigs of ram.

Or if you can get the Boss to cough up a bit more money go with this one.

Presario CQ61 - 406SA: £399.99
http://tinyurl.com/2d439b8

All I would say is get one that has a 64-bit processor and uses a ATI graphics card as the open source driver for Ubuntu works great, so HDMI and composite/compiz works out of the box. Also remember that a shared graphics card will use the RAM that's already installed. For an example if the laptop says it comes with 3GB of ram and a 1024MB shared graphics card the system will only be able to use 2GB of ram.

If you want a SSD drive it will be much cheaper to fit your own then buy a laptop that has one already installed. They have dropped down in price by quite a bit recently, and are very easy to fit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U23F8JuKKE).

Kingston 30GB V-Series 2.5" SATA SSD: £69.74
http://tinyurl.com/2cdg78o

And just put the old HD into a 2.5-Inch USB Enclosure (http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?moduleno=221180) so you can use it to put your Documents/Files onto.

Johnsie
July 21st, 2010, 02:02 PM
Ps. whatever you do, don't buy a laptop from Argos without actually knowing the computer. It's extremely difficult to return it to them if you don't like it. I bought an MSI netbook off them and the speakers were rubbish, so I tried to take it back and they refused to replace or refund it.

Since then I have bought other netbooks off them, but only ones that I know are good. The do good prices, but you have to be careful what you buy.

Always read impartial reviews when buy any laptop.

kingmoffa
July 22nd, 2010, 04:06 PM
Thanks for the info.

The Compaq laptops listed above look interesting , but Im put off by the ATI graphics having been burnt in the past.

I need to connect to an external monitor. Im thinking about a new macbook with nvidia graphics.

conundrumx
July 22nd, 2010, 04:50 PM
Get a Thinkpad. T series is 14", quite nice. The X series goes down to 13", but the price goes way up. Thinkpads are quite popular amongst Linux users and typically well supported.

MasterNetra
July 22nd, 2010, 05:24 PM
www.system76.com enough said.

...though come to think about it I dunno if they ship to the UK... If not HP.com is probably your best bet.

pinguy
July 22nd, 2010, 06:38 PM
Thanks for the info.

The Compaq laptops listed above look interesting , but Im put off by the ATI graphics having been burnt in the past.

I need to connect to an external monitor. Im thinking about a new macbook with nvidia graphics.

In the past nvidia was the better choice to go for with Ubuntu, but not anymore. I have had more trouble with on-board nvidia graphics then I have had with ATI. Every system I have worked with in the last 8 months that have been using ATI graphics have all worked flawlessly.

I am running a Radeon HD 4670 and couldn't be happier with it.
Do a bit of online searching and you will see that the ATI Radeon HD 4200 is get pretty good reviews.

Plus (you didn't hear this from me ;) ) Mac OS X Leopard runs really well on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series as these are what they use in there systems. I know a few people running it on there PC's/Laptops.

kingmoffa
July 23rd, 2010, 10:48 AM
I may well reconsider ATI then - I just need external monitor support not 3D / compiz or other fancy stuff.

The dell desktop I bought with ubuntu preloaded came with an ATI card. It worked ok - but had a few problems here and there when a kernel upgrade happened. (This was with official driver not open source).