Helmholtz Coil's Journal: More On Laptops

I've decided against putting FreeBSD on my old laptop for the moment, primarily because it looks as though it wouldn't support my Backpack CD-RW drive through the parallel port. Oh, well, it would've been cool. Since then, I've installed Debian stable on it and it's working great. It's a little more functional than it was under VectorLinux, although at the price of being a little slower.

Using this older laptop for a while now was (I think) a sort of "try before I buy" experience. I'm thinking about my next computer purchase-believe it or not it's been better than 10 years since I bought a new PC (primarily buying old second-hand machines since then). But now I'd like to get something shiny new.

Anyway, I think I'm sold on going notebook this time around. I've noticed for a while now that people tend to be either pro or anti notebook when it comes to their purchases, and so using this older laptop was a good way for me to discover I'm pro-portable. A lot of my friends don't like portables because of the usual issues-keyboard and small screen mostly-but I like being able to lug it around room to room, building to building. I don't play much in the way of games or listen to music, so as long as the display's crisp I'm happy.

Of course, I would like to run Linux or BSD on the new laptop. If there's anybody listening, feel free to make a recommendation on a laptop/notebook that's (in order of importance) inexpensive and that supports Linux.