It’s just about New Laptop Time. Not quite, but almost. Being a Linux only user it’s always an adventure trying to figure out what hardware to get. Hardware support has definitely gotten better under Linux, but figuring out what actually lives inside the system you’re thinking about picking up at deep discount from Office Max certainly has not. And I’m not a dual-booter either. I don’t have Windows to fall back on should something not work on my laptop. I take a scorched earth approach to Windows on my hardware, and generally wipe and repave the whole thing. Especially if it’s my personal laptop, which is what I plan for this to be.

Currently I’m leaning very heavily toward the Thinkpad X41 tablet. It looks like there’s good X support for a bunch of stuff that’s traditionally a pain in the ass under Linux. Screen rotation seems to be working (without restarting X, thank god), the input driver for the touchscreen, power management (including frequency scaling), and wireless using ipw2200. Anyone out there with an X41 tried Linux and care to toss in some comments before I pick one of the things up? It’s hard to tell from wiki postings just how painful is it to get the thing actually setup, and there’s always the chance that the instructions on the wiki are wrong or incomplete.

On a very much related note, anyone know a good shop in the San Francisco Bay Area that could come up with some Pimp My Ride style dashboard mounting and wiring hookups for my car?