With the laptop on the dining room table I couldn't wait to push the power button. Never mind the power cord. Within a minute or two, I had filled in "root" and its password, on the login screen.

And... there it was, the Gnome desktop, ready to go. A quick click to the Mozilla browser confirmed that I was connected to my home's 802.11b access point. Too cool.

Moments before, the UPS guy had delivered a shipping box with a complete Red Hat equipped Centrino powered Linux laptop, courtesy of LinuxCertified, Inc.

Morgan Lim, of LinuxCertified had offered to loan me one of their premier Linux machines for a product review. It took about 2.5 ms to accept his offer. Being a Linux technology writer is a tough job.

LinuxCertified has an interesting marketing model.

Several years ago the company was offering Linux classes to researchers, academics and others who were migrating from Unix environments. Linux provided several key advantages, such as cost, enhanced productivity and access to a huge range of software tools.

Back in those early days, LinuxCertified needed a way to get some high profile attention for their classes. Hey, how about giving laptops away with their courses? They purchased refurbished Thinkpads from IBM Global Services, loaded Linux on them, and gave them to the students in the classes. Not only did the student then have a machine to work on in class, but they'd also be able to continue their Linux education long after they finished the course.

The idea caught on and LinuxCertified began getting requests from alumni for more laptops (both refurbished and new). At the beginning of 2003 they started selling their brand new LC2000 series laptops with a choice of distributions: Red Hat Professional, Fedora, Debian (the LC2430 model was officially certified by Debian), SUSE, etc. The company will also be shipping Sun Java Desktop and Xandros, as well.

Which brings us to today. How does the LinuxCertified model LC2210 Linux laptop measure up? Let's find out.

Next: What's In a LinuxCertified Laptop? »