Imagine spending 1000 pounds or more on a product without any real guarantee that it will work for your intended use of it. So I would assume you wouldn't want to do that, but if you want to run Linux on a laptop that's the risk you have to take. There are number of integrated features on laptops that mean a particular model may not work fully with Linux, such as wireless interfaces, 3D graphics, power management etc. For desktop Linux its a case of doing you research, finding out what works and picking the right components or buying from a vendor that sells Linux systems such as DNUK or Armari. Unfortunately for laptops that is made almost impossible by the fact that laptops come as a complete unit without interchangeable parts and none of the vendors of laptops offer Linux or support. This leaves it down to the customer to work all this out before buying, often with incomplete information about the system's components. So, consider this, if two vendors sold essentially the same laptop at the same price but one offered a dual boot option Linux+Windows, which one of them do you think would sell more units?

The Following text refers to original blog mangement system I created for http://www.richardcunningham.co.uk/blog/ which has now since been superseeded by the blogger version

Right, the blog system which supposed to be simple a just take 'a few minutes' after weeks of work is finally here. For those who are interested, the admin system works by using some PHP pages which modify a source RSS like file using DOM and XPATH. When the blog entry is ready some XSLT files are used to convert the RSS like source file to output RSS, HTML, HTML for mobile and HTML archive pages. For those who weren't interested in that I guess you have already stopped reading!