My specs: 1 G RAM, 100 G HD, 1.6 GHz Pentium M. Cost about USD1500, plus California tax and shipping.

That being said, not everything is perfect. This page records some issues I've had with the laptop and notes on fixing them. If you're considering one yourself, feel free to contact me.

• Do not currently preinstall Centrino drivers; if you want preconfigured 802.11, you need to buy the $99 prism54 card. It's worth it.
• KWiFiManager doesn't work. Missing libiw.so error. Can use /sbin/iwconfig just fine to specify an ESSID or the configurator. Tech notes with laptop suggest installing waproamd instead.
• No WPA2 support? or if there is, not obvious how to turn it on.
• gmplayer does not like writing to the screen when running as non-root out of the box. Workaround: su and run from terminal.
• A 1.6 GHz Pentium M is too slow to do software decoding of audio on some DVDs (e.g. Fantastic 4) with the SDL out.(!) Workaround is to use different audio driver. Required some time with the mplayer man page.
• I miss the trackpoint. Especially when playing Quake3. The keyboard is not as good as a ThinkPad's, either, but not terrible.
• 11 March 2006: The laptop has developed a hardware problem. When I adjust the screen angle, the screen goes dark entirely. Shortly thereafter, the green lights above the disk icon and battery icon start blinking rapidly. Removing the battery and attempting to restart sometimes works. Unfortunately it also sometimes leads to all four lights coming on and staying on with no other change to the machine.

  Not sure what is going on. Maybe having it on and running for 35+ hours in one sitting had something to do with it. In any case, have notified LinuxCertified support. There is a one-year warranty for hardware issues; we'll see what happens. In the meantime, time to back up data.

• 17 March 2006: Laptop received by LinuxCertified. Receipt is acknowledged with an e-mail by the LC staff. Diagnostics start.
• 23 March 2006: E-mail from LC staff indicating that they have reproduced the issue. The e-mail also indicates that they are talking to their motherboard vendor about a fix.
• 30 March 2006: I send an e-mail to the LC staff; response within about a day tells me the laptop has been repaired. Tests are almost done, plan to ship that day. Later, receive QuantumView notification that laptop has indeed shipped. ETA: 3 April 2006.
• 3 April 2006: Laptop arrives at my office. Everything seems to work. Thanks, LC!
• 27 May 2006: The problems have returned. I have been in denial for the past week and a half, but there is now no doubt that my machine is spontaenously rebooting for no good reason. I am sometimes seeing the same failure to boot as before, as well. Fortunately, the problem is not as severe as before - the failure to boot is only occasional instead of almost every time. Unfortunately, this may make the problem hard to reproduce and fix. Writing another e-mail to LC support.
• 7 July 2006: Laptop arrived last week while I was on a conference trip. Now seems to be working fine again. Thanks, LC!