Like Shawn mentioned in his post with regards to Linux on laptops, back in the day it was difficult to get them to work. Like Shawn also mentioned, today things are much better.

I would download one of the popular Live Linux CDs that allow you to boot up Linux without an install. You can then take the CD to wherever you plan to purchase the laptop(big box store, garage sale, etc) and see if it boots. That will go a long way in telling you if the laptop hardware is recognized by a particular Linux distro. Specific Live CDs I like are the ones from Kubuntu and Damn Small Linux(DSL). Kubuntu is more full featured than DSL but DSL will run better on an older, low powered laptop. I've run both on a wide range of laptops and at a minimum, they will bring up a nice desktop with wired ethernet support if the hardware is there. WiFi is a bit trickier. I've successfully used the Kubuntu and DSL LiveCDs on quite a wide range of laptops. I'm always amazed at how well the boot to CD distros work without disturbing the hard drive. I've even used them to recover data files from Windows laptops that would no longer boot. I read just today about another Live CD in the LJ Desktop forum called E-Live that I also plan to try.

Wrt a full installation of Linux on a laptop, I bought a laptop back in 2004 to try out Linux. It was typical hardware of the day and had an Nvidia graphics card. With minimal effort I loaded SuSE 9.X. I most recently loaded Kubuntu 7.10 and it also installed without hardware support issues. There are some Kubuntu undocumented features that had to be sorted out for some apps but again, nothing specific to hardware compatibility. Nvidia cards typically will work with the standard drivers but you get better results installing the drivers downloadable from the Nvidia web site. Even with "just" 1GB of RAM, the performance of this almost 4 year old laptop is excellent running Linux.

Linux has been stable for a long time. What I really like about it now is that it includes plenty of features for daily use, enough that I can just install and use it without tinkering. In addition, if I want to tinker with things like the kernel, I could do that. Since you mentioned you want to experiment with the kernel, DSL that I mentioned above might be a great place to start. It is designed not only with low powered PCs in mind but also tweakability. The DSL authors even sell a book on DSL which I have and highly recommend. I am far from a kernel experimenter but the book does offer much insight on the inner workings of DSL and Linux in general.

Enjoy and keep us posted on your progress!

Mike Roberts is a bewildered Linux Journal Reader Advisory Panelist.