Those "Linux installation reports" were aimed at fellow linux users which did happen to own the same laptop model into which you had already successfully installed Linux.
Yep. And it's still useful, I've been looking for a new netbook for a while now and for every one I check out I search the net for other people's experiences w.r.t. running Linux on it.
Back in the day, installing Linux was not an easy task, so when you finally got your IrDA, your XWindow, your PCMCIA, your ZIP drive, your sound card, and your network card working properly, and you were a "pioneer" in doing so with your laptop model, then it was "customary" to document your configuration, your tricks, your compile options, your boot strings, so than other linux users could go straight into using the same laptop model with linux benefiting from your previous research.
Actually I don't see much difference between yesteryear and today, it wasn't particularly difficult to install Linux back then, or at least not much more difficult than today. It was always a question of:
a) having Linux kernel support for all the hardware (drivers etc.
b) finding out what type of hardware your computer has in the first place so that you can check out a).
It's been like this for nearly twenty years now.. the first few months were slightly more tricky, but since mid-1992 it's been mostly like today: Figure out which hardware you have, compile in the drivers you need for your kernel. Build and install. I still do exactly that.
There are two changes that can be considered enhancements to this process:
1) Loadable drivers were introduced in the early nineties.
2) Which makes it feasible to have an install tool (as well as runtime tools) that will try to figure out what hardware you have, and load the drivers for you.
Laptops were always and still are the most tricky ones, because they keep changing hardware all the time. The worst ones I've used are the Fujitsu-Siemens laptops, not because they are more difficult to get running than others, it's because the exact same model number can have completely different hardware. It looks like they just built the things from whatever random batch of networking chipsets etc. they had got their hands on this month. So checking on the net if that's a laptop which will work well for your Linux installation ins't easy. Or you install one, buy another (like in an office environment) and find that the internals are quite different.
Incidentally, the most tricky operating system installation I've ever done was installing an off-the-shelf version of Windows XP on an old HP laptop. It had been running Windows 98 or something before, and then the owner (my niece) bought Windows XP and had her geek friend installing it. That messed up everything (he had completely ignored that those laptops _need_ that special HP sleep/restore partition, and scratched it. And it didn't work anyway), so she came to me. I had to track down a bunch of obscure HP-specific drivers to get it working. Never had that much trouble with a Linux installation, after all, either the driver is there somewhere in the Linux kernel source or you can as well not bother (unless it's wi-fi, because that's usually pretty easy to get working with ndiswrapper and Windows drivers).
Back to those installation report pages: What they were really useful for was to tell you what hardware those laptops have, and if there's a driver for it. That information (what hardware) is almost never part of the technical description you find in those places where you can buy the thing. This is as true now as it was back in 2001 or earlier.
-Tor