What is the difference between Linux on a laptop computer and Linux on a desktop or server machine?
First, laptop computers are rarely used as servers, so the user interface and the selection of user-level programs are important. Second, laptop computers have many devices not typically found on desktop computers, such as such as power management (APM), PCMCIA (“PC-Card” or “CardBus”) slots, Infrared serial (IrDA) ports, and Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports. They often have non-standard versions of common devices such as floppy drives, CD-ROM drives, modems, sound ports, and display controllers. If you bought some random portable computer, you might need to locate drivers and specially configure the system. For some devices on some common laptop models there is no driver available, so you would not be able to use those parts of that computer under Linux.
