Kernel not recognizing your hardware? Problems with power management or PCMCIA? What hardware is compatible with Gentoo? See here. (Only for kernels supported by Gentoo.)
Soon I was thinking about purchasing a notebook with which to use Gentoo Linux on. I was curious as to how many browsers of this forum have built a succesful working Gentoo on a notebook.
If you want everything to work, the only thing to stay away from these days are Centrino-based notebooks. There's no Linux support for the built-in mini-PCI wireless device.
Perfectly supported down to the last piece of hardware by now: my old Vaio.
I've got everything working on my Vobis 15M9D... except for Firewire and the internal modem... didn't need them till now and didn't test and install drivers for it...
i'm surprised about the graphics driver... the FireGL-drivers produce less glitches in games than the win-xp driver delivered with the laptop... :-/
I've got an IPC Startnote M15 with everything working (except the winmodem which is almost working), I've even got dualhead mode working. Its based on a SIS630/700/900 chipset so anything based on that chipset (which is a lot of the low end laptops) should work...
Everything works great (except I haven't bothered to try the modem). There is something with the ALi chipset that causes it to hang on boot with the 2.4 kernels but there is a patch out there for it. The 2.5 kernels take care of it.
I love it. It's about 3 pounds, has a CD-RW/DVD combo drive and it gets about 4 hours on battery with constant use. The drive is removable and you can put another battery in its place. Fujitsu claims 10 hours of battery with the addition of the second one and though I've never tried it I believe them--they've been very good about accurately advertising everything else. Another cool thing is that the LCD has a 15:9 ratio.
I use it for normal day to day stuff--email, web browsing, playing music and also several scientific applications. The only thing it fails at is gaming.
I have a Toshiba Satellite 1400-S151 and a Satellite 1800-S256. It took awhile, but by searching the forums, I got everything working correctly (I have not tested the modems). After overcoming the learning curve of an initial setup, I don't think installing gentoo on a laptop is that bad. I've honestly had a worse time getting things working the way I want them to in Red Hat and Mandrake on these laptops.
Dell Inspiron 8200 working almost fine, except :
1. the MiniPCI WiFi card isn't supported ( Broadcom BCM4301 based ).
2. I never tried to get the winmodem to work.
3. Suspend to Disk ( I'll try software suspend, with kernel 2.5.72. As soon as I can get my Netgear MA401 PCMCIA wireless card to work with the development kernel. It works fine with 2.4.20, but not 2.5.72 )
I set Gentoo up on an Acer Travelmate 225XC and it works perfectly -- though I haven't tried the internal modem or nic.
On an older HP OmniBook 2100, I didn't get the sound working right away and at the moment, I just can't be bothered to work it out. In other words: I'm quite happy with my laptop not squeaking all the time.
i have an old graphite iBook running gentoo PPC. the install was painless and everything on it works (i haven't ever bothered doing anything with the modem but others seem to have gotten it working without trouble).
I have a fairly old Thinkpad 770X. Everything works perfectly. Even have a lovely bootsplash/framebuffer background! As a few other posters have mentioned, Thinkpads work very well under Linux.
Everything is working much better than with Red Hat though I haven't bothered to test the modem. The touchpad is working great now with the Synaptics driver.
Works pretty good on my Gateway Solo 51XX. Fonts are always botched up on the login manager but it's not a gentoo specific problem. Distccd is your friend if you got another box you can offload some of the compile to.