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Didn't Get That Linux Laptop for Xmas?
cvbear0 writes: "You didn't get the laptop you wanted for Christmas, did you? Well, surf on over to the Linux Laptop SuperGuide. The guys from the Linux Hardware Database and ZDNet have build a list of Linux-friendly laptops. Users can also post their comments about their experiences with certain model. Send back those 15 sweaters you received, and find the Linux laptop of your dreams!" My wish is that power management under Linux would be fully supported. Getting four hours battery life under Windows and two hours under Linux is disappointing.
Getting four hours battery life under Windows and two hours under Linux is disappointing.
Since you need twice as much time to get anything done under windows, what else can you expect?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
The ACPI support in the 2.4 Kernel is much better than the APM support in 2.2. I have been using this and without a daemon running it still keeps the power usage low, lower than with APM. It has allowed maby 3-3.5 hours I think, compared with 2 from 2.2. I have not set down and really tested it too much but it has seemed to act much better than in the past. There are downfalls from the earlyness of it though, like the time does not advance when the laptop is asleep, so you have to run xntpd each awakening. It shows though that very soon Linux will be there too.
My wish is that power management under Linux would be fully supported. Getting four hours battery life under Windows and two hours under Linux is disappointing.
.3V differential helps to meet the odd voltage specs. Or just carry around a few car batteries, a 12V cigarette lighter socket wired to some alligator clips, and one of those car adapters for your laptop.
INFIDEL! MISCREANT! Pustulent bootlicking LAPDOG of WILLIAM HENRY GATES III! Knowest thou not that the WRATH of the PENGUIN shall fall upon thee? May thy hard drive CHIP and SHATTER!
Those who would trade security and essential freedoms for a little power deserve not security, freedom, or power.
D00D! 11|\|UX R00lZ! J00 AR3 A 5UCK0R A|\|D 1 0\/\/|\| J00!
What sort of loser hacker are you? Just buy a bunch of AA batteries at the airport or K-mart or wherevery you are and solder them in series/parallel to meet your laptop's power specs. If you can't get it exactly, try combinations of NiCad and regular batteries, as the
I'd like to run a FreeBSD laptop. Does anyone have a good site for FreeBSD laptop compatiblity?
espo
The Compaq iPAQ handheld also overuses its batteries. I wonder if power management isn't a problem across all Linux architectures?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
As far as the other brands, stay away from Toshiba; they're the manufacturer of the cheapest (and shoddiest) laptops around. HP isn't much better. Only the Compaq Armada series is worth retrofitting with Linux. All Dell systems should work out fine. As for Gateway, those laptops are worth their weight in cow pies.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
You don't need to spend $2000 on a laptop to get one that works with Linux or other free OS's.
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-lapto p/
Not only does it have a laptop compatibility list that is twenty times larger than the ZDNet one, but it also has howto's, discussion forums, and much, much more.
Getting an inexpensive used/refurbished laptop is not very hard to do. There are plenty of places on the Internet and elsewhere to find your hardware needs.
Dollar Computer, a frequent advertiser in the back of Computer Shopper, has made finding a laptop in your price range rather simple. Just go to their site and input the price range that you are willing to pay. I did a search for models costing between $0 and $150 and came up with three (one 386 and two 486s).
The minimum requirement for running Linux is, of course, a 386. I would suggest, however, that if you are going to run Linux on these low-end machines, that you do so without X. X Windows is a big time resource hog that you can live without so long as you are willing to "go primitive" and use a command line. There a solitare games that can be played in text mode and SVGAlib, so you have alternatives to going with a full GUI environment.
Most of the old hardware will be supported under Linux, but you might want to look at the Linux Laptop pages before you buy.
I hope this helps.
My laptop (see subject) works great with Mandrake, mmm, 7.2. The battery life is shorter, I figure around 2.5 hours, but it totally kicks ass on lose98. Think about it. A real OS on a P3 700. Woo Hoo!!!! I chose Mandrake for it after installing a number of others, including FreeBSD 4.2, which didn't work all that well, sniff, I've been a FreeBSD fan forever. Anyway, Mandrake was by far the simplest to install, virtually everything worked, except that piece of shit winmodem. I got the software modem to work via linmodem though.
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Of course, why buy from Sony, the near-monopoly of the movie industry? So you can screw them over by not registering or using their provided software.
The above logic, "buy Sony hardware but screw Sony by not using their provided software" made me laugh.
Hardware enjoys a hefty markup over the price that covers COGS (cost of goods and services) plus NRE (non-recurring engineering). They tack on US$35 or so, about 1%-2% of the total retail price, to include software made by other companies. They value your registration card somewhere between $0.05 and $5.00 in marketing, which is about 0.3% max of the total retail price.
Oh, Sony's quaking in their boots! Sony is in the business of making hardware and media. They outsource the software and content. If you don't use the software they provide, they frankly don't care .
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Installation of Linux on IBM ThinkPad is pretty painless. IBM is well known for his support to Linux community, and it reflects on every model of its ThinkPad.
There are ThinkPad Configuration tools if you are interested
Above all, ThinkPad is reliable. You can see from the fact that second hand ThinkPad sell at pretty good price at Ebay.
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-employee of IBM and I really hate IBM but I still think ThinkPad is a great product.
Thanks.
The version of X that is running on the Linux iPaq is nowhere near as bloated as the one that typically ships with a Linux distribution. And it is not necessarily X that eats away your resources... it's the programs that typically get run under X. Like Netscape.
Right now, I am running X and it is using 3.36% of my processor time on a Celeron 366. Imagine what that would be if you were running X on a 386 or a 486. I also have about 11.5 megs of RAM allocated just to X. That's fine on a machine with over 32 megs of RAM but we're talking machines with 4 or 8 megs and very little hard disk space to allocate to a swap partition.
Sure. You could run X if you wanted to on an old 386 or 486... many of us have done so. But I stick by my original post. If you want to run Linux on low-end hardware, I would recommend running it without X.
Keep in mind that the only way for a program like X to communicate with the framebuffer is to mmap() the whole of the buffer into it's memory space, which seems to inflate its consumption. In reality, it's not using all of that.
If you're running GLX, X may even be mapping stuff more than once, and be mapping an MTRR region. Don't trust what top, ps, and friends tell you about what X is consuming. It's really not.
*Ahem* and Linus ran X on a 386, too. I've run X on a 486, and it's really not that bad.
No mention of Apple PowerBooks on that site. LinuxPPC runs fantastic on many of them!
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Okay, here are the links you'll need when picking out a free software laptop:
o p/
. html
n etbsd.html
:)
Linux:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-lapt
http://www.linux.org/hardware/laptop.html
FreeBSD:
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~dkulp/fbsd/laptop.html
http://www.jp.freebsd.org/PAO/LAPTOP_SURVEY/index
OpenBSD:
http://www.openbsd.org/i386-laptop.html
http://www.monkey.org/openbsd-mobile
NetBSD:
http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/netbsd/laptops-and-
http://newsletter.toshiba-tro.de/netbsd/
X window system LCD configs:
http://www.sanpei.org/Laptop-X/note-list.html
http://www.sanpei.org/Laptop-X/Laptop-X/
Notebook survey for graphics/PCMCIA
http://hci.ucsd.edu/dsf/notebooks.html
If anyone has any other links for other free software OSes, please post them
--posted anonymously to avoid karma whoring.
Nope. I am using X with a 2MB Neomagic graphics chipset. And no, since there isn't a Hardware Accelerated driver for Neomagic that works under 4.0, I am still using a 3.3.6 server.
And yes, I have run X on 386s and 486s myself, and sure, it wasn't all that bad. But when you step away from a high-end machine and sit down at a machine running X on a 386, you suddenly realize that you have been spoiled. I used to think that waiting 5 minutes for Summer Games to load on my Commodore 64 was pretty darn quick, but now I get impatient when Netscape take more than 20 seconds.
Five years ago, running Linux and X on a 486 was great, but now that I have a Celeron 366 with 96MB of RAM, I don't even have the patients to run X on my Pentium 100 with 48MB of RAM (both machines are laptops) the Pentium 100 now serves a my commandline only machine, and I do all my graphical tasks from the newer machine.
I am sure that once I upgrade to something better than I have now, I won't be patient with my current machine either. Let's face it, we get spoiled.
It is still my personal recommendation NOT to run X on a 386 or 486 laptop. And if you are going to run X, don't run it unless you absolutely need it for a particular application.
That is simply my personal recommendation. Take it or leave it. If you want to recommend running X on a 386, feel free to do so.
I recently bought my laptop (Topaz 8400) from http://www.tuxtops.com with RedHat 6.2 pre-installed and I love it. It couldn't be easier and you don't have to pay the Microsoft tax.
Just to nitpick, XFree 4.0 uses "drivers", not "servers". Secondly, I didn't hallucinate the neomagic driver that I'm using right now on my laptop. It's there. It even supports XRender. Go to the XFree site and take a look.
> My wish is that power management under Linux
> would be fully supported.
> Getting four hours battery life under Windows
> and two hours under Linux is disappointing.
I use a Gericom Overdose 2 laptop and I had 3 hours with Linux, BeOS 4, Win2k and Win98.
I therefore have to say I had a wonderful surprise when I switched between kernel 2.2.17 to 2.2.18.
This is more a matter of stability (no more crash during blanking) than of durability.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Gateway Solo 1100. It's got a Neomagic 128XD or something like that, and it does 800x600 at 24bpp (which is just fine for it's tiny display). I upgraded to RH7.0, and Xconfigurator set up X on it just fine once I told it to use 4.0 from the command line options. (Xconfigurator --help 2>&1 | less). Everything 'cept the modem (which I don't use, given that I have no modem ISP account. I love broadband!) works just great. It used to die out of suspend, but there's a fix in the apm configuration files to turn off DMA on suspend and turn it on in unsuspend that fixes the problem.
a few calls to select U.S. retailers to buy a "thin-and-light 14"TFT linux notebook",
2000.dec.19 - dec.23
dell seems to offer some redhat models on their website, but the links fail if you try to buy.
dell sales-people (on the phone) say linux is not available.
dell's Inspiron 4000 comes very close to how i'd like to see my machine, at $2350.
compaq 1.800.888.0220: (don't have any linux notebooks at this time)
compaq is the reason why i want the manufacturer to install the OS for me -
i spent 2 days in 2000-may failing to become friends with compaq's graphics chip.
fujitsupc.com 877-372-3473 (don't sell linux.)
gateway.com 800-846-4208 (we don't offer that operating system)
toshiba.com 1-800-316-0920 (runs on eastern time or something?) no linux
ibm-direct: yes they have linux pre-installed but the price seems to be about 60% higher
than dell+windowsMe
--- some lesser-known retailers and re-sellers:
tuxtops: don't have "thin-and-light" models
enpower: "thin-and-light" model coming soon - that may be worth the wait.
here in LA, some PC Club employees said they would put linux on there for me.
necxdirect.com (failed - no phone number listed)
microwarehouse 1-800-397-8508 "sorry, we don't carry any."
elinux has some 20 models of older yet pricey notebooks, nothing juicy.
--- places that I didn't get through ---
nec 888-632-8701 just rings and rings
sony 1 800 352-7669 (will try next week)
CDW 800 850 4239 (closes early?)
I do this kind of thing on an outdated laptop with a 233 MHz Pentium, and I'm fine. Mozilla could be faster, though. In other words, *any* modern laptop will serve your needs. Just make sure that you have lots of RAM, that's the major speed factor. My machine has 160 MB and it shows.
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You may like my a cappella music
You can try Tuxtops. The Linux Store also seems to stock some pre-loaded laptops.
Note I have never done business with either of these companies. I just recall them advertising Linux laptops in Linux magazines.
In all cases, though, these seem pretty expensive. It seems to me that you could find a better deal somewhere else, then load your own distribution. I tend to customize and tweak so much, I can't imagine having someone else load my system for me. But YMMV.