Re: [gentoo-user] OT: advice sought on new laptop for Gentoo

[Florian Philipp]

Am 05.09.2010 14:58, schrieb John Blinka:
> Hi, all,
>
> My trusty Inspiron 8200 is on death's door and so I'm looking for a
> new laptop - one that will run Gentoo straightforwardly, of course.
>
> I really liked the 1600x1200 display on this machine, which I greatly
> prefer to the 1600x900 display on the more modern Inspiron 1545 I own.
>  Most of what I do now is through a web browser, and I can see much
> more of a web page with 1200 lines of display than I can with 900.
> And I dislike the massive width of the 1545 which makes it much less
> portable than the old 8200.  I'd love to replace my 8200 with a
> machine of similar dimensions, but thinner and lighter.  However, I
> cannot find any machine on Dell's website with a 4x3 aspect ratio -
> they all seem to be approximately 16x9 now.
>
> So,  is 16x9 all that's available now in laptops?
>
> If I'm stuck with a 16x9 aspect ratio, then I'd like to get something
> significantly narrower and more portable than my 1545 (14.75", 37.5 cm
> wide) and with as many horizontal lines in the display as possible.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> (And, yes, I'm open to a non-Dell solution.)
>
> Thanks for your suggestions,
>
> John Blinka
>

I couldn't find a 4:3 laptop when I tried to replace my Dell Latitude
D520 which had a marvelous 1400x1050 display, either.

In the end I settled for an HP ProBook 6450b with the "better" display
option of 1600x900 (14"). The whole case is 33.5cm wide.

All at all pretty good.

Wifi drivers are not in-kernel but in portage (broadcom-sta). Everything
else works out-of-box.

Keyboard is also good for typing but needs a bit more pressure than the
Dell.

The docking station is inferior to Dell's. No SPDIF output and it lifts
the laptop to quite some angle.
On the plus side it has eSATA and the larger one even a built-in HDD.

Performance and noise levels are also good.

Hope this helps.
Florian Philipp