Hi there. I saw a nice laptop toshiba L300-1F9 Satellite L300-1F9 - Product Specifications - Toshiba in store and wonder if linux, preferring suse, would fit on it. I did some googling around but didn’t find any definite answer. The most troublesome hardware may be the sound card and wireless. Does anyone maybe have this model and what are your experiences with it. Thanks for help.
Have a look at: Hardware - openSUSE
and see if you can find it. If you get the toshiba spec sheet, you can check if there is any hardware that won’t work.
I do not know about wireless, but sound typically can be made to work, as long as it does not have hardware previously identified as being on the Linux incompatibility list: Linux Incompatibility List
Although one thing about sound, if it is especially difficult, after many posts trying all the things I can think of, it may be necessary to write a bug report and get one of the openSUSE packagers for alsa (where alsa is the sound driver) to look at the problem. They are also alsa developers and they almost always solve the problem after a lot more interaction with the user.
However I find many new users do not have the patience to go that far. …
Hence it is likely best to do what you are doing now, which is to look for EASY compatibility, as opposed to compatibility after a LOT of effort.
Thanks mates, unfortunately this model isn’t on the linux compatibility list, which doesn’t yet mean it wouldn’t work, but I’ve came up with another idea… the model I’m interested in, is exposed on the shell in the store with I think Ubuntu live cd running. So if the seller would be nice enough to let me use usb stick, I could do
hwinof>filename
from konsole and copy the file to usb to later analyse it’s hardware in details.
If it runs ubuntu, it will run suse or any other distro. Just check that the wifi is detected.
This should be the case, but unfortunately there can be hiccups. I purchased a Dell Studio 1537 laptop (with winXP) where that EXACT same hardware is also sold with Ubuntu. The thing is, some of the hardware did not work well with Ubuntu as sold by Dell, … at least not initially. (Edit - although overall it was fairly good)
Some did not work well with openSUSE either (for example the sound). But I managed to get the openSUSE alsa packager (who is also an alsa developer) to fix the sound and he pushed the fix upstream so all Linux distributions could benefit.
I have read of cases (especially in sound) where Ubuntu have come up with fixes, but they have NOT pushed the fix upstream to be addressed. Ie they KEPT it to themselves. In some cases they passed it on to Debian, and Debian did not immediately pass it upstream. The result being one is looking at a long time before a Ubuntu fix makes it to the rest of the community.
I have seen many cases where Ubuntu found the fix around the same time as another distribution (such as red hat / fedora or openSUSE) but the Ubuntu upstream submission was way behind being submitted, compared to that of Fedora or openSUSE.
Anyway, that is a reason why I WILL NOT use Ubuntu, and its why just because Ubuntu have it functioning, does not mean it will immediately function in other distributions, although eventually it should be made to function. Its often best to get the detailed hardware info, and look at each component individually, to confirm openSUSE functionality.
oldcpu
I have seen many cases where Ubuntu found the fix around the same time as another distribution (such as red hat / fedora or openSUSE) but the Ubuntu upstream submission was way behind being submitted, compared to that of Fedora or openSUSE
Thanks for that … and here we are saying that every disto is open and should be equal! Gone are the old days of linux sharing then … but that’s a new thread elsewhere.
Then again I did say he should check most of the important parts (to the user) work.
Personally, I have always liked suse, despite its short-term glitches for most of the same reasons we all do - other distros concentrate only on windows interoperabilty, but suse also give linux/*nix interoperability.
Not gone, but there are delays which I believe are more than just technically motivated. 
Indeed, and I think your assessment is overall pretty good.
I see “ubuntu” oem on the Toshiba as a good start, but if it were me, I would still like to go one step further and confirm “openSUSE EASY compatibility” with each component.
Thanks, as mentioned I’ll try to get hardware details from laptop first, and then check them.
Since all sets of this model got sold out I bought another notebook acer emachins g725 because from what I could see using live cd from Musix everything worked ok, sound and wireless, but there are big problems with it, I put it in this post Acer emachines G725 hw problems 
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