Actually, it is possible, should you be willing to order say ten thousand a month. This is probably the primary reason nobody sells laptops designed for linux. The dirty secret of american computer companies is the ODM, or Original Design Manufacturer. Asian companies exist that will design an entire laptop to your specs, among other things. They keep the design, you get to buy it and market it under your own brand. iSupply has suggested that 86 percent of all laptops were made by OEMs and ODMs. The largest one, Quanta, serves Dell, Apple, MIT's one laptop per child project, HP, Toshiba, etc. So don't blame Dell or Apple engineers for designing a bad laptop, blame them for accepting bad designs from another engineering firm, or maybe requesting bad parts ;)

Of course, if you can figure out how to sell ten thousand laptops a month, you probably already knew most of this. =( But laptops are pretty much all done via PCB, rather than expansion cards, so shopping at newegg to build a new laptop is pretty much out of the question.

On 9/7/06, Jonathan Hutchins [email protected] wrote:

By the way, when I said it wasn't possible, I meant scratch-building your own out of components, not selecting features from a manufacturer, which obviously IS possible. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list [email protected] http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug