I'm no expert, but re hardware I'd suggest you look more closely at the modem issue and less at the display issue; I don't know of any display chipset which has serious won't-work-at-all issues under X whereas winmodems are everywhere in the laptop market. Re binary-only drivers, my home machine has an Nvidia chipset for which I use the non-GPL binary driver happily under Debian (there is a GPL driver too, but it has poor 3D performance).
It may be worth working out which laptop has the best specs and then if that has a winmodem, buying a PCMCIA modem - I think even cheap PCMCIA modems are real.
Oh, and don't buy a cheap no-name laptop. Mine fell to bits quickly.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2003-01-17 05:18 am (UTC)It may be worth working out which laptop has the best specs and then if that has a winmodem, buying a PCMCIA modem - I think even cheap PCMCIA modems are real.
Oh, and don't buy a cheap no-name laptop. Mine fell to bits quickly.