Xandros teams with LinuxCertified to provide pre-installed Linux laptops with full-spectrum connectivity and universal file sharing. The LC2210 Mobile Laptop with 14″ XGA TFT LCD and LC2410 Linux Laptop with a 15″ XGA TFT LCD are both being offered at the introductory price of $1399 in North America.
Certified Xandros Linux Laptops Available
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Eugenia Loli
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Great overpriced hardware. I’ve gotta get one.
They want $1750 for this puppy. Probably not a bad deal, but it would be nice if they had offered a UXGA screen (1600×1200) and a better graphics card. If you’re going to go ahead and pay this much and get a decent 3d card you might as well get something like the ATI 9600 pro with 128 Meg or maybe even the ATI 9700. You gotta remember that you’re stuck with the card forever unless its upgradeable(which it probably isn’t).
The brand new ATi cards are not well supported on Linux ATM via XFree, so it is probably not a good idea to go for the absoulte high end.
I looked at the refurbisched section and found out they are
quiet expensive. 749 dollar for a PIII 500 mhz?
I bought a refurbisched IBM T23 PIII 1000 mhz with DVD and 256MB memory a 30 GB hd for 650 Euro (ex FAT) last month.
Could be that a made a superb deal..
Anyway its nice to see that Xandros is going to be pre-installed its a nice distro.
I have an ATI 9600 Pro (128 Meg) on my slack partition and it is very fast and I’ve never had a problem.
This is my first ATI card and its my understanding that since ATI releases the specs to their cards XFree86 has drivers as well as ATI itself. The ATI drivers work fine, which I would assume is what Xandros would use if they’re actually installing the OS on the thing.
I agree with Bas, you can get refurbished laptops for a lot less. For example http://www.retrobox.com has Dell Latitude C600’s with PIII 1000 mHz and 256 MB RAM, 20 GB HD for $672 US. However, they come with no operating system and no warranty.
Actually, the Pentium M (Centrino) – 1.4 GHz laptop is a great deal. If I were in the market for a laptop this is exactly what i would buy.
Fully supported and fairly light. I haven’t seen Centrino laptops for less money, so I do’t kow where people get off claiming that these are expensive.
Additionally, this is the beginning of a trend of a growing number of certified linux on laptops.
Not sure about the rest of the community but that is too expensive! I have GNU/Linux Libranet on my Fujitsu FMV4 Series notebook. Cost of Libranet 50USD and plus cost of laptop, 900USD = 950 USD.
Features on laptop:
128 meg of DDR RAM
20 gig HD-IDE
1.9 P4-M
ATI-Radeon IGP
Integrated with sound, NIC,
14.1″ screen
3 USB Ports
I could have went cheaper but this was reasonable for me.
Anything over 1000USD for a laptop; the vendor(s) is asking for too much.
since I am looking for a new laptop, why would one get this rather than an iBOok?
since I am looking for a new laptop, why would one get this rather than an iBOok?>>
Because, on paper, they look faster.
—
The specs you posted are less than impressive if you want to do anything more than take notes with your laptop.
128 meg of DDR RAM
Not nearly enough. I’ve been using machines with 512MB for about 2 years now and it’s getting to the point where it looks like 1GB will be necessary soon.
20 gig HD-IDE
I dabble in pro audio, so that would last about a week for me. 40GB is the absolute minimum I would take in a laptop today. My PowerBook has 80GB.
ATI-Radeon IGP
Not exciting
14.1″ screen
At what resolution? Anything less than 1280 pixels horizontally is not usable if you do serious work on a machine.
3 USB Ports
USB 2.0 or 1.0? USB 1 is fine for mice/keboards, but I’d hate to try using a USB hard drive or digital audio interface across it.
My point is that you can get a laptop for under $1000, and that laptop may be fine for a casual user, but you do get what you pay for. If you’re a serious user you have to spend some money to get a machine that will help more than it hurts.
Why get this over an iBook? If you want to run Linux this is probably a better laptop for you. It’s possible to run linux on mac laptops but it’s a bit disheartening to be in such a sub-micro-niche. Nobody builds linux ppc binaries for you so you either have to build them yourself or wait for your distro to include them. That’s fine if you’re a go-it-alone kind of hacker, but I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint of heart.
If you want to run OS X, on the other hand, the iBook would probably be better for you. ;^) I would recommend checking it out — OS X gives you the hackability of Linux combined with the commercial polish of Apple. It’s a winning combination for a lot of people.
I am really surprised about the comments of these being too expensive! In fact, after reading the PR, I was going to post something asking how come they are so in-expensive. I think folks compring these with sub-$1000 laptops are comparing apples with oranges.
I agree the refurbished laptops on their website seem a bit pricey, but the new ones, as mentioned in this osnews article seem pretty darn good for price/performance.
“My point is that you can get a laptop for under $1000, and that laptop may be fine for a casual user, but you do get what you pay for. If you’re a serious user you have to spend some money to get a machine that will help more than it hurts.”
Totally true. Cheap laptops appear to be a good deal, but when it comes down to it, they are unusable. The best thing to do is to buy a high-end laptop with >= 2Ghz P4/AMD M, >= 15″ screen capable of 1600×1200, top-notch 3D card >= 32 meg, wireless lan, >= 512 MB ram, and >= 60 gig hardrive.
If you really expect to do some work with your laptop, don’t opt for low-end, it is a waste of money. I’m stuck with the laptop I bought a year ago, but at least it has all the above specs and allows me to enjoy the laptop even if I start to upgrade some software later on without seeing my lappy grinding to a halt.
I use 1024×768
It does what I need to do. . .programming and internet stuff. I don’t see why for you 512 megs of RAM is necessary unless you’re doing some really heavy number crunching or heavy graphics. Makes no sense, but thats just me.
Cycloneous
I paid $800 for a laptop last summer with the following features:
14.1″ Screen
Mobile Athlon 1800+
40GB HD
ATI Radeon IGP
512MB DDR RAM
2 USB (not 2.0) ports
~ 7 lbs
I wish I had firewire and USB2.0, but I don’t use any devices that use them. My real regret is that it weighs so much. My next laptop will weigh much closer to 3 lbs.
I have to agree with the above poster, though. More than $1000 is way too much to be paying for a laptop.
“It does what I need to do. . .programming and internet stuff. I don’t see why for you 512 megs of RAM is necessary unless you’re doing some really heavy number crunching or heavy graphics. Makes no sense, but thats just me.
”
I thought that 512 meg was too much and unnecessary as well, until I started to use Linux, which caches stuff a lot. You will see quite a performance improvement with more memory, especially when you use a bloated KDE desktop and have tons of apps running.
Right now I have 50% memory in use and the rest is cached. So 512 sounds a lot, but is avoids swapping 
I’m fixing to get a laptop soon. I will prob get a microtel / walmart for $700 or a low end dell. If the used ones (@ retrobox) were more affordable I might get one of those. While I’m sure IBM, etc are very fine hardware, paying so much for an older laptop doesn’t make sense to me. If I can get a big enough drive, I plan to run Slackware, Windows 2000, Openvms, and Freebsd.
“I thought that 512 meg was too much and unnecessary as well, until I started to use Linux, which caches stuff a lot.”
I totally agree with 512 meg or more. I have an older cpu (that may be half the issue) 500 mhz, and run 128 to 256 meg. With 128 meg I am restricted to running simple managers like afterstep. With 256, i can sort of run KDE on most distros. However, loading suse 8.1 and redhat 9 on that box resulted in a very slow experience. FWIW, i was using an ibm 7200 rpm drive, not the crap one supplied with the machine.
My 1.6 ghz, with 256 meg (3600 rpm laptop drive) was ok with Slackware 9 and KDE 3. (In all fairness a desktop with 1.6 pentium and 7200 rpm drive would have done better.) However, I still preferred running Afterstep. I guess I’ve been spoiled by the lighter weight managers, and until i get a fast box, i won’t use KDE daily.
Anyway if you have a 3 to 4 year old computer, even with beefed up ram and HD, don’t expect much out of KDE.
What brand is your laptop? There aren’t too many out there with AMD chips.
Any Linux user would like OS X if they used it for a short while.