Slashdot Mirror
On Linux Laptops
KuRL wrote in to tell us that Salon has a piece by Andrew Leonard on Linux Laptops and why they haven't caught on. Talks a lot about the cursed WinModems,
mentions that VAIOs are yummy, and more on the subject. Its probably stuff that the average Slashdot reader already knows, but its a nice piece.
I've been running linux on a Fujitsu Lifebook E330 ever since I got it. I installed RH5.2 and then 6.0 on it without a problem. There was some problems when I needed to use the RH rescue disk to redo lilo when I upgraded my mini win98 partition (need this partition for the winmodem). The laptop did not want to boot the RH rescue disk. I had to use a slackware boot disk to get back into my linux partition. Other than that everything worked great. Got X and the soundcard working on the first shot. The only problem is that I can't use the winmodem and the IR.
I can see why some people would be turned off to using linux on a latop if they can't use all of the hardware (winmodem/IR/etc.). If somebody spends the money for a laptop, they are going to want to be able to use all of it's features. Also no company seems to make sure their linux disto works on a laptop. I've heard stories from people who couldn't even get their laptops to boot the install disks.
There is a Linux Laptop Volunteer Support Database and a Linux on Laptops that contain large amounts of info on getting linux up and going on a laptop.
Speaking of the Sony VAIO, does anyone know how well Linux runs on those tiny ones, with the integrated CCD camera. That computer would be a real treat, small enough to take with you, big enough to run Linux (and have a keyboard.) It's like a really big Palm. Kinda like my old Gateway 2000 Handbook from days of yore.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Can I get a hell yeah?
Personally, I'd love to have a little linux box to do network troubleshooting. Take it wherever I go, run a tcpdump, look for odd stuff. It'd be ridiculously useful. I could even run sendmail off of it to demonstrate to my more annoying clients that their firewalls were misconfigured. (In general, they assume that it's a routing problem before they look at their own logfiles.)
I believe late fall was their target date. Dell makes good stuff btw, I know (and am) one happy Dell owner.
I talked to a guy at the Linux Expo in Raleigh who said he worked for IBM, and that they were infact very interested in porting the drivers. He told me that they had to just take care of legal issues, and then he was expecting his superiors to give him the go ahead to rewrite the drivers. He also mentioned it shouldn't be dificult. I obviously don't have any confirmation on this, so take it as you will.
Erik
Well, apart from the really IE-specific crap that most Office programs will spit out, when I use that "Save as HTML" menus, they seem to be quite nice.
Unless of course you want to re-open the thing in Emacs or another editor and actually change something later. All that used for alignment are just too scary for me to touch...
Using Emacs to edit HTML and open it later in some Office program has worked just fine though. Plus, Emacs supports my CVS at home, which no Office-suite has ever dreamed of working with -- at least, not until now.
Just my $.2
My other computer runs FreeBSD too.
Yep.. That's how I first found out that it can happen. My father-in-law had gotten a brandy new speaker, and I started to crank in some medium res RealVideo stuff thru the 56k modem, and it all started beeping like MAD.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I do have a laptop running Linux Redhat 6.0. I must say, I love it, however, the win modem did seem to cause a problem. I had to buy an external modem to gain access, but that was the least of my problems. Redhat 6.0 is apperently not very good with PCMCIA, therefore, it was quite difficult connecting to a network seeing that my laptop did not come with an Ethernet NIC. My suggestion if you are intrested in purchasing a laptop and intent top use any version of Linux as the primary OS, make a duel boot system, it will save you headaches in the future. If you must connect to a xnetowrk for some reason (to gain access to a university netowrk), then you just use Windows and a PCMCIA ethernet card. Otherwise, connect to the internet directly using a compatable external modem.
I know - I bought one. Video support is a problem as most new chipsets are not supported by XFree86, and you must use Xi or another X Server. I am sure XFree86 4.0 will fix much of this (I hope).
Yeah, i've seen this at some models with external floppy drive. They desperately want to talk to a floppy at a boot time IF it is connected. Simply disconnect the floppy drive at boot and it will boot from disk.
I *think* I saw something to this effect somewhere. By October, maybe? ATI just lost a big business deal with Dell over some sort of Linux issue - maybe it was over laptop video board issues.
The article does mention that the new Vaios come with WinModems. D'oh!
void post { post_random_comment("slashdot.org"); karma--; }
vmware. its slow, but a ctrl alt f'ing around is way faster than a reboot into another os. nt 4 wouldnt support my pcmcia ether cards, but vm encapsulates em - they look like amd pci's
amaze your friends. use windoze masquerading to get your linux boxxen on aol's net. feeling misanthropic - dos attack yourself. flaunt your a.d.d. and use microsoft tcp/ip printing instead of reading a printer howto. snarf up more than your fair share of dhcp leases.
oh yeah... ms office and visio works. audio catalyst cd ripping (mp3 encoding works) is about the only thing ive found that will make vm fall down and go bewm.
I have RH6.0 running on a couple of Dell Latitudes here at work and don't have any boot problems.
Dyslexics Untie!
So to all you out there drooling for a Vaio, just remember you may need to by a PCMIA modem anyway, and oh yeah, as far as I can see the Vaio only had one PCMIA slot (if I recall correctly).
It actually depends on the model of the sony vaio
I have a PCG-F250 (celery 366)
it comes with a cdrom drive as far as the modem I didn't bother with it cause I was pretty sure it was winmodem but other than that
the modem and sound are only linux problems I've ever had on it.
of course I've only used SuSE but I'm going back to old slackie 4.0 this very minute to see how things are.
This was also mentioned in an earlier slashdot story, but www.linuxlaptops.com sells a few types of laptops with Linux pre-installed and configured. I'm typing this on one (I've had it for a few weeks now) and am very pleased with it. Not a solution for everyone, but if you're in the market for newer machines, you might want to check it out.
i love mine. i have had it (PCG 505fx) since this past christmas. it's flown 55,000 miles with me and gone everywhere. it studied with me. it did my website with me. it was my glorified walkman. it's my absolute favorite toy, and i LOVE the fact that it's so small! my only complaint: more battery life.
My only disappointment is the small video memory. Ah well. It was cheap, and it does its work well -- ssh terminal, portforwarder from the SMB network at work to the one at home, carries data back and forth, etc etc.
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
If I had a laptop then I'm sure I'd have Linux running on it for sure. I don't have much use for a laptop right now though. Everywhere I go when I need to use a computer there's always a workstation right next to me. This is a definate plus of being at a university though. There are labs all over the place.
Even in the dorms most rooms have a box of some sort connected to the network. From there I can just SSH to my box and do whatever it is I need to do.
A wireless networkable handheld would be what would make my life easier.. something to do email from... scheduling, etc... That's what I need.
Yes, the Sony VAIO's are yummy. Any machine that costs well less than $2000, is less than an inch thick, and is pretty much 100% compatible with Linux is super!
I'm not slagging the article.. it was written okay. The fact that he mentions that Perhaps linux & free software developers have hit a 'wall' when it comes to supporting brand-new hardware is untrue. This is not an unforseen wall, but a problem that we have had since day one. 90% of the problem is manufacturers/vendors who refuse to release technical specs so we can write drivers. Technical support depts that don't know what kind of hardware is in the laptop, because all they know is what driver to use in windows. Windows has made the world stop asking for hardware standards. Now that is changing.
I've been using a Tecra (730CDT) for almost three years now. It's a phenomenal machine. I've dropped it numerous times (early on in its lifetime) and never had a problem. Only recently have I had some issues with the keyboard and hard drive, but since its still under warranty, Toshiba replaced both parts. I couldn't have dreamed up a better portable. If only I could get X to display in 16-bit color (which the machine supports). Now I'm looking to get one of those Tecra 8000s!
If anyone from IBM is reading, tell your superiors to release the specs for the MWave Sound_Card/Modem.
If IBM doesn't want to write the drivers, fine.
But please don't keep us from writting them! We are willing and able...
Civ CTP is awesome! Thanks Loki!
Romans 10:9-10
I've been running linux on my laptop for months, its great. a metricom wireless modem makes it ideal. the biggest hassle was getting NT/98/linux to work with the boot loader but that was really the only hurdle.
I use both Win95/RH Linux on 1 HD. 2 Partitions.. At the win95 Boot menu select "Command Prompt" then run "linux.bat"... (loadlin baby, oh yeah...)
Since im using X windows alot, Linux is my choice for this. Also connection to serial ports on sun boxes. But then, im back into windows for Exchange, Word, and Excel. (If I only had a linux version!)
Only thing I dont have working in linux is my Wireless Sierra CDPD cards. (Sitting in my yard, reading my exchange mail!)
If you want a linux laptop, with a painless install try Dell latitudes..
Network Card is a 3Com Fast Etherlink PCcard. Modem is a USR 56K PCcard. (Simply Awesome)
Bargin laptops are the antichrist to anyone who has ever worked IT. Not to long ago, a company I worked for got in a bunch of Toshibas and Compaq laptops who's Windows 98 installs where horked. I mean the sound was not quite SB compliant, the Video was detected at 512Kb or ram when I can *see* both megs on the board. I won't even start on the built in ether. The truth is, these laptops aren't that well put together. SuperProbe would probably throw an absolute fit trying to determine what the Video was doing. The ethernet, which was supposedly NE2000 compliant ended up being a derivative of the 3C509.
What it boils down to is these machines shouldn't even be marketed as x86 compatible. Since I have never tried to install Linux on anything other than a lame laptop, I can't speak for the "good ones". I sincerely hope they are better.
And to leave you with a question, who actually makes this lame hardware? The company who printed those boards ought to be smacked with a wet salmon.
Mike
Let me second this notion! I too have a Lombard G3 (333 MHz PowerBook), and it runs Linux beautifully! The Debian install wasn't too bad, either. LinuxPPC seems to offer a graphical install, if you're a fan of a Red Hat-style distribution.
X runs accelerated (through the ATI framebuffer) at 1024x768 at 32bpp on a 14.1 inch screen, I have a 3 button Logitech USB mouse installed, the 10/100 Mbit ethernet is great (I plug in at home, at work, wherever). The built in modem works great; I get 5.1 KB/sec over local phone lines. It's even got external SCSI connector, built-in CD-ROM. I can pull 6 hours off the internal battery while doing the odd compile work in X. You can fill the second media bay with a battery and pull more than 10 (or so Apple says, I'd believe them).
If this reads like an endorsement for the G3 laptops and Linux, it is! The thing's nice and fast, and getting Linux installed in place of MacOS is simple. It's unfortunate that my purchase "included MacOS", but I'd rather funnel money back into a company doing great things with hardware.
--
Of course, to an $87 billion-a-year company like IBM, 200 names don't add up to all that much. Tom Figgatt, Linux segment executive for the IBM Netfinity Servers group, says that while "we have certainly heard demand from segments of the laptop community, I would say that it is not coming from the broad business user." Wake up IBM!! You're not talking about 200 of your average users. These 200 users are leaders in technology. One of them could be the IT decision maker for a corporation that is need of 2,000 or more new laptops. Even if they are not initially loading a Linux desktop, they may want to purchase equipment that will be Linux "compatible" for future Linux deployment. 200 users wanting to run Linux on your hardware could result in tens of thousands of units sold. Which of these HTML tag thingies will insert a blank line?
Let's hear it for laptops running the ARM chip!
Why couldn't Corel computers have made my day with
one of these?
Low power consumption, low heat chip designs are nonexistant in full-fledged laptops today.
Ever have a PII laptop start your lap on fire?
ARM chips must be great for long lasting, small laptops, not web servers!
//Pauly
I have a WinBook that I took on the road doing rock tours with. It ran RedHat and was handy to have. My biggest mistake at the time was buying a Megahertz nic/modem card. Be SURE that the exact model you are getting is fully supported for both functions. For the longest time only the nic function was supported in mine and I had to drag an external Sportster around with me to dialup.
If I had it to do again I'd go with the cheaper two card solution and buy a seperate modem card and nic card. This way you could use both if you wanted at once, save some cash and some trouble with configuring. The Megahertz card is really expensive compared with a pair of generic single function cards.
As an interesting aside...I found KDE to be really handy to have on a laptop. I don't run it often on this box but on the laptop the layout made getting around with the (shudder) touchpad much easier. Also mine was a dualscan display and the default colors of KDE just looked better. Kppp is really handy when you have a different dialup number all the time while traveling. Don't forget a nice 25' phone cable to have too you'll thank me later.
Another quick laptop tip. Get a personal 800 number from ATT and setup mgetty if you have a cable or dsl connect at home. The rates are cheaper than many isp's 800 access rates and of course you can have your home system POP'ng your mail etc in crontabs via your cable or xDSL connect. Much quicker to just snag the mail or read it via the home box over one's own private dialup or an ssh session via a net connect.
Fast and powerful, thats why. Fully linux compatible ..
Problem I hate about the 56k Winmodems, is that if you're doing alot of things, it will CRC error, becouse the friggen DRIVER doesn't get enough CPU time.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
The article states that someday hardware will JUST WORK on whatever platform it is in. Hmm, alas yet again as happens with many people for some reason,, they forget that apple did this in 1984. Any hardware that was apple JUST WORKED with apple. No bs you just plug it in and go. For some reason a great many of you don't want that :(
I upgraded the memory to 48M, added an external battery for 5 hours of fun and a cell modem for TCP/IP everywhere. The cell modem didn't support Linux, but thanks to a web pages out there and some judicious reading from manuals, I have wireless IP for $25/month flat rate. All of this in a 2 pound package. Yummy.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
The Sony Vaio PCG505TR currently doesn't come with a WinModem. I just got one three weeks ago. As far as I can tell everything works with Linux and Xfree86, (except the IRport, I don't know about that because I don't use it). But the Modem works fine.
i've got a toshiba satallite 4000cdt and it works great. works with out of the box redhat and caldera just fine. only trouble is getting this shitty pcmcia nic working with the dhcp server. but it works eventually.
One of the nicest things I found about linux on laptops it you can hotswap pcmcia cards. I could never get this to work on Win95, 98 or NT, hard enough trying to get a card to work _once_ let alone after a reboot, and don't dare remove it.
I think I gave up, and I never use windows anyway, now when you insert a card it will either lock up or tell you to reboot.
I could even just about get away hot swapping the CD-ROM and floppy drive, which share a bay. (it ofcourse tells you this is not possible in the manual)
I would agree that used laptops are an excellent alternative for many of us, even those of us who probably could afford a fancy laptop if we wanted to, but would rather spend money on something else.
I have an old ThinkPad 355Cs (33MHz 486SX) which I run Linux on. It has a few setup quirks (goofy floppy drive, wonky video chip, etc), but once set up it works pretty well except for the MWave sound/modem, which I've been told only does 9600bps on the modem side anyway. I use a 3Com MegaHertz (Gateway labeled) combo 10b2 Ethernet/33.6 modem PCMCIA card, which works great (I picked it up cheap as a closeout when the 100bT/56k models came out).
Its not a screamer, but I added 32M of memory (taking it to 36M total) and replaced the original 250M hard drive with a 2.1G drive (no problems, the ThinkPad found the geometry automatically). It is a workable, luggable machine for about a third of what a decent new laptop would have cost me.
If anyone is interested in details on how to get one of these things running, let me know. BTW, most members of the ThinkPad 355, 360, 750 & 755 families are very similar hardware wise, so the same info that works on my 355Cs will also work on a lot of those models.
What the article briefly touches on and then doesn't explore is the proprietary nature of laptop technology in general (and I'm not just talking about Windows laptops either). The confined spaces of a laptop have poised unique problems to computer manufacturers and the solutions have been, well, unique. IBM's MWave is only one such solution. Because you can't just plug in the components that you need, laptops tend to have funky motherboards, peripherals, and input devices. PCMCIA is one solution, but the article points out it's not elegant.
I suspect that as the size of computer components continues to shrink, we'll see laptops approaching a more standards-compliant state of being (and we'll see desktops shrink, too). That is, if Intel can figure out a way to quit making mondo processing chips.
I've heard very little about winmodems. About all I know is that they are software driven and dont work under Linux. What are the advantages and disadvantages (apart from not working under Linux) of having a winmodem ? There must be some great advantage to make the CPU useage worthwhile (I guess they use quite a bit).
>What are the advantages and disadvantages (apart
>from not working under Linux) of having a
>winmodem ?
The advantages:
Cheap
The disadvantages:
Relies on Windows
Easy to corrupt drivers and/or settings
Hard to reinstall drivers
High CPU utilization
-LjM
Just to let you know,
IBM Thinkpad 355's do not have MWave modems/soundcards. The first IBM Laptops that had MWave modems were the 755CE/CSE/CD models. The 355 does not have an integrated sound card at all. The 750/755C/CS have a cheap business sound card installed in them(that is not even SoundBlaster compatible).
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
Hmm... That's why my modem used to CRC so much. I just thought it was a crappy modem anyways. NT4 has an option to been on error and I used to turn that on when someone would walk in the room. Combine a beep every 3-6 seconds with 20 windows open on your screen and they think you're busy and leave you alone.
MSoft for once is actually releasing an upgrade without changing file formats. I have not tested this with Star Office, but I have had no trouble moving both spread sheets and word documents between Office 2000 and 97 (both directions).
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
G3/PPC laptops aren't that common, are they?
Where can they be bought? I'm in the market for a new laptop, maybe this is a good solution for me...
Details?
j.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Well, in general, to set up any type of hardware under any operating system requires either that the OS in question include support for that device (whether it supports the device in its "native" mode, or because it can be run in a fashion compatible with a supported device), or that a driver exist that can be added to the OS; that's as true of non-plug-and-play device as of plug-and-play devices.
Up to a point.
I have managed to get an old P75 with 48M of RAM which I use occasionally but I find its too slow for what I tend to use Linux for now.
Nowadays I'm running Gnome or KDE and various packages (e.g. StarOffice) are waaay too slow for realistic use on this. Even on my main machine (also a laptop, but a P233MMX with 128M RAM, 6.4G) I find StarOffice is sometimes frustratingly slow and Gnome is a noticeable performance hog.
Still, yes, for some applications an old 486 laptop would be useful. Problem is most of the applications I really want on my laptop - so that I can 'do them anywhere' are more of your productivity ones, which tend to be X based.
Andrew.
Yes Dell announced awhile back that their Inspirion and their desktop lines would be available with linux installed. ATI lost their deal over more than their laptop boards, as none of their cards support 3d acceleration in linux. That's why dell is offering TNT and Voodoo based cards now.
Im not entirely sure, but I think that the Office 2000 file formats are exactly the same as the Office 95/97 file formats.
So now we'll be calling it Office 95/97/00.....Oh, how I hate Office
-Shane Stephens
I tried the "save as HTML" feature of Word 97 and was disappointed to find MS proprietary crap in the HTML file. There didn't seem to be any way to save a file in portable HTML format. I've heard that Office 2000 has the same problem.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
With all the hype about craptops, I would definately recommend Dell.... My LCD went a little Nuts on me around 6 months ago,(prolly because of me trying to tweak out the little NM 2160 on it for X), but the tech talked me through some minor boot procedures, then said 'OK We'll have a Box for you there tomorrow, and We should have it back for you in 3-5 days' True to their word, I got my laptop back in 4 days all fixed and ready to rock (GRRR now If I only told them about the !@#%!$#@ soundcard problem I created YES I KNOW THIS ONE IS MY FAULT... Don't try running your laptop through a 32-channel Peavey powered mixer to encode your favourite jams in MP3 format... Word to the (un)Wise )
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
I don't have a notebook myself... but what video and audio chipsets is the 2595XDVD outfitted with? The NeoMagic chips (which many notebooks have used in the past) are supported as of XFree 3.3.3, afaik, and many of the ESS Technology audio chips used in notebooks are supported in Linux. (Not all, sadly, but it's being worked on.) So it might work better than you think, depending on what it's got.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Got mine from BestBuy (the real thing, not the www) at a very good price. The new models where getting out, so they had this one under heavy discount. Had to drive 1 hour to get to a store where it was available, but no problem. Very very happy with it, it is fast as hell, runs windows and linux perfectly, is very small and I use it everywhere. The 1024x768 screen is gorgeous. Online? Huh, no idea. :) Good luck, go for it, best laptop Ive had in 10 years, first one that lets me run linux as well as the box back home.
I recall hearing that (at least on IBM notebooks with the suspend-to-disk (what they refer to as Hibernation) feature) the first partition needed to be a DOS partition, at least big enough to hold the system-image file, and you just had to initialize it in DOS (don't know if you had to do it on each boot - if so, you'd probably hafta run the little init utility then use loadlin to jump to Linux, but if it only needs the file to be inited, then you could just use LILO). Dunno if that helps any, but this is what I recall from a webpage I came across once some time ago...
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
that's why there is StarOffice
I think the most useful part of this article was the address of the Linux Mwave petition. If you haven't signed it, e-mail here
That petition info is on this page.
because the modem is mainly software based, it is easier to upgrade the 'firmware' or is software?
Doesn't pretty much every word processor support HTML? I don't see why one couldn't be working in StarOffice or Emacs or whatever, save as HTML, and reopen in M$ Word as a regular .DOC file. Am I missing something?
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
You wouldn't happen to know when they'll start offering Linux/Inspirion, would you? I've been looking at getting a laptop for a while, and Dell was the direction I was looking in.
My biggest complaint with the whole thing was the reaction I got from the rest of the linux community. Often when I told people that there was no driver I was told to write one. But, when I explained that the specs hadn't been released a few people told me (they were actualy serious) to reverse engineer the chip in a cleen-room. I don't know how many of you have cleen-rooms around but I sure don't have one set up in my living room if you know what I mean. Nor do I have the time to reverse engineer a graphics card on a single chip.
Eventualy a driver was released and I thank all those who contributed to it. However, I still am troubled by the way non-laptop linux users don't support their fellow linux users in dealing with laptop OEMs and the OEMs' suppliers.
Which brings me to my seccond point:
It's not just laptops!!
Linux always lags behind other OSs in hardware support. Usualy this is due to some manufacturer not supplying drivers or worse still not releasing any information about the hardware. But other times it's just because we are slow. USB is a perfect example. The specifications are all open yet there's no linux drivers for USB stuff.
One of the great selling points of the open development model is that it can addapt quickly (e.g. IPv6) but it always seems to lag in hardware support.
I got a Dell Inspiron 3500 about a month ago and it runs linux quite well. The only problem is the damned winmodem they put in it... The sound works, my Linksys 10/100 PCCard ethernet also works and is how I am connected to slashdot. I love it, and would recomend it to anybody interested in a nice linux laptop with all the trimmings for just over $2000
I have/had a laptop running linux. it was a Compaq, but the only prob was that it had a WinModem, so no net for me.. tsk-tsk. other than that, I never really had probs with it.. yay linux!!
If/when I get another one, i'm going to make sure it has NO winmodem....
Insert mind here.
http://www.illusionary.com/~dglidden/4015CDS.html
I started with nothing and I still have most of it.
I forgot to mention that my laptop has NEVER crashed while running Linux. When I had win98 installed it crashed every single stinking time I turned it on.
I started with nothing and I still have most of it.
I have had 4 laptops in my life (Ok 6 but a Tandy model 100 and a Zenith Supersport dont count)
all of which have run linux well.. I have gotten 16 bit color on all displays, gotten sound to work on all, and have only ran into a handful of pcmcia cards that I couldn't get to work (I have found that the cheapest off-brands work well while the name brands fight the whole way when it comes to pcmcia) Toshiba satelites work (Including the IRDA) great, CANNON innova-books worked well (the screens stink though) and the VIAO screams... my favorite was a GRID ruggedized laptop... ran Linux without a hiccup..
the only problem is that laptop users are usually (78% of the time) brain-dead executives that carry a laptop for "status" and couldnt turn one on let alone figure out how to install an OS. (can you tell that I am impressed with corperate america?)
The laptop isn't the choice for people... it's the choice for the road-warrior/exec that needs lotus notes, and the silly pripetary windows programs (try giving a secretary a RTF document... she'll say "it's not word, I cant read that... no matter how many times you explain that word will read it.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's the funny part... they're suposed to be cheaper but they never are.
I can get hardware modems at the same price or less than a "winmodem"..
I just tell people that winmodems are a scam, they are designed to make the consumer buy low-grade products for a premium price because the manufacturer knows that they arent smart enough to tell the difference...."remember the yugo?" that usually get's them to buy a real modem...and isn't very far from the truth.
Now: where the heck can I get a Zytel modem in the States?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
i luvs my linux TP560
It was a painless RH6.0 install (via PCMCIA ethernet and DSL to ftp.cdrom.com) and most everything works great. Except I have major problems with hibernation mode working consistently.
I love throwing up my ricochet antannae in a public place, which usualy attracts a latent (or blatant) geek or two and then watching their eyebrows raise up when they see it's a linux box.
My buddy has the same setup except on a TP600 which means he has the processor speed to really show off (like running "klaser.kss -inroot"). Only problems with the TP600 is that there isn't stable support for DVD or USB yet. Not sure about his hibernation mode status.
Linux also seems to give better bandwidth over the ricochet wireless than running W95 on the same machine (the 600 is a dual boot).
Just today I bought a PC Card adapter for my digital camera memory so now I can xfer images directly to Linux. Totally painless. Wrote a script to automatically mount the flashcard and copy the images into a jpeg directory. Other scripts automatically create thumbnails and html pages for them.
In the morning I can jack into the DSL, use wget to slurp wired news, slashdot and freshmeat and then read them on my train commute to work (ricochet doesn't work in the subway). It was so easy to set up in Linux and would have been a bitch in W95 or MacOS.
I'm looking forward to messing around with the Linux Infrared support when I get the chance. ...There's so much available for a developer in the Linux environment! It's like a never-ending playground, I wouldn't want a laptop with any other OS again.
</BABBLING IDIOT MODE>
I found out the hard way that I have a WinModem in my Hewlett Packard Pavilion 6418. I had to do some research for an assignment and the modem died. It has just been replaced but I still had great difficulty with the telco getting online again. Tell me more about WinModems, I'm new to the game.
You may be perfectly right. I recently bought an old 486 laptop (a DX, 100MHz) for about $250, and everything works fine: network (UTP 10MBit), 14K4 modem, 800MB harddisk, 10" TFT-display.
:-)
And: It is perfect for running X remotely (I'm typing this message on a Netscape running on my faster desktop computer, but everything is displayed on the laptop!). That works pretty fast....
So, after I bought a ~100ft UTP-cable, I can now relax in the garden while surfing the net
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
I'm getting a new laptop in 2 days, and it's going to have NT 4 installed on it. It's a very nice machine (esp. compared to anything I've had before), with a Celeron 466 (the use the desktop processors!) 128 megs of RAM, and a pretty nice video card, and other neat things. What I was wondering was, how hard would it be to get everything up in running with linux? I'm most likely going to want a dual-boot environment as well... and I have a 3COM PCMCIA 10/100 +56k Modem card... will that work alright? Just looking for general ideas and opinions as to the possibilities I'll have with this. Thanks.
What?
Isn't one of the biggest problems in hoping that Linux Laptops will catch on the old problem of M$ Office compatibility? Lots of people that have laptops are business types who don't want to get stuck without their computer, and they aren't going to start using Linux on their laptops any time soon if they can't copy their M$ Word documents straight back onto their desktop when they get back to the office...
Yes, a huge market for linux laptops - but for old 486's.
Why? 486's run Linux great, but Windows 9X really, really lousy. Both 486's and Linux do what you need them to do, seems a perfect match for me. They're in the right price range for younger geeks still in school, and they're old, so hardware is more likely to be supported, and they're (for the most part) pre-winmmodems.
I know I just got ahold of a Compaq 486/75 and I'm going to put linux on it and use it for my C++ coding at school.
Before I'm flamed, I used to use a WinModem, now I have a real, proper, external modem (and am no longer limited to just Windows, too).
When I did use a WinModem, I was able to use it for some time, but upon returning from a trip I found I simply could not connect. I blamed the modem.. and I was partly right.
After replacing the WinModem with real, proper hardware I did some digging and found the local telco had "upgraded" its equipment. I dug because my then new 33.6 was never getting above 26.4 or so. A few days and several calls later I had 28.8+ connections.
What irked me was not merely the telco, they perhaps hadn't known the effect they would have. What irked me was that while the 'real' modem wound up connecting slowly, but connecting, the WinModem simply failed. Even with Windows and its pet drivers. I played by the rules set, and got burned anyway. Now I have a modem that 'Just Works'.
The problem is not only the WinModem evil: Laptop hardware seems to be such a custom beast, that sound and video drivers need to be custom written. I remember trying to get NT 3.5 and 3.51 to run on one of the first Pentium laptops: that was a worse configuration effort than anything I have seen with Linux. Beta this, alpha that, to get any sound, and to get anything other than the lowest resolution.
My primary computing platform is an older Tecra running RH 6.0. I had to tweak some XF86Config options to get proper resolution, and compile a kernel to use the proper sound card settings, but it was all standard Linux. By contrast, to get NT working, I would have to download a set of custom video and sound drivers from Toshiba. So Linux is actually in a better situation than NT here.
My other Net Admin and I have been running RH on our Dell Inspiron Laptops for the past year.
Recently "the Admiral" has turned his laptop into an FTP/Network Monitoring server that not only our techies, but Cu's can use to get software updates.
Aside from the initial NeoMagic Chipset problems with RH 5.1 where I had to tweak out the XF86Config file, we really haven't had much problems getting these little badboys working and staying running. He's got somewhere around 79+ day uptime. ( and that's only because of rebooting for quotas).. My laptop I've been using as a workstation for remote access to my servers, checking connectivity problems at remote locations with a variety of modems ( my Fave being the Megahertz 56K from 3Com which works even with the quirky 3.9b12 from Livingston*cough*/lucent)
Why haven't they caught on???? mayhaps people are just too happy *cough,cough* leaving 'Doze on em and using netterm/hyperterm to connext
yeah yeah -1 me allready
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
After I just posted above, I realized a little quirky thing that is happening to my Dell 233MMX with 144MB running RH6.0 :)
I HAVE to press Enter during LILO, or else I get a Kernel Panic when VFS tries to open the root partition, anyone have any kinda nifty tricks that I have missed? (I tried lowering the Timeout, that didn't work, Ran Disk Druid and Re-Partitioned the hda5 which Root resides, that didn't work) It's not a MAJOR problem, just a PITA when I go to get a cup of coffee and forget to hit Enter
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
I do all my business on a Compaq 1900T (400 Celeron, 128 MB RAM, 10 GB disk, 1024x768x16bit at 13.3"). I am a Java/CORBA/Web/cool stuff consultant.
I use Applix for my reports (export to RTF) and my invoicing. Applix has read every document I've thrown at it pretty well. I haven't had any complains from folks using Word to read Applix either.
I use javac, emacs, mysql, gcc, etc for "real" work.
My book keeper does use Win95 for Quicken and I have to travel to a client site to use Rational Rose on NT.
The Compaq 1900T has worked pretty well, except if I close 'er up on suspend, it gets hot, the fan kicks on, the battery goes dead, then it cools down. I would prefer that it stay cold or shutdown.
Compaq offers no documentation on the sound system. Apparently it is part of the NEOMagic graphics chips. OSS offeres limited support (good enough for me).
I don't, nor did I plan to use the built in modem. That isn't normally an issue; I'm either on site or at home, both of which have ethernet.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
For all you guys that have VAIO's, where are you getting 'em from? I'd like to start shopping for a laptop system, but I don't want to pay premium price for a system I'm going to end up re-installing the OS on - is there a better source for them online?
j.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Quote from the article:
A future in which everything "just works" might be a tad too utopian for everyone to believe in, but it's certainly worth working toward.
I've been dreaming for years now for a simple, easy to use, reliable computer, notebook or desktop, that I can buy/build now and have running nicely 10 years from now. My needs are these: A very good word processor, ppp connection (oughtta still be around in 10 years I hope...), email ability, and mp3 or mp2 playback. I've almost become so disgusted with this multifacted OS, upgrade-itis, and reliability dilemna that I've started looking into getting myself a nice old portable typewriter. Alas, I would miss email terribly much though.
"I want peace on earth and good will toward men." "We're the U.S. government. We don't do that sort of thing!!"
I'm running S.u.S.E. 6.2 with the 2.2.10 kernel on an Acer Extensa 390:
:7(
Pentium 166
64 MB RAM
2 GB Harddrive
It supposedly has a winmodem but the port been cemented over for European users, presumably so we don't injure ourselves. I'm dual-booting with the Win95 which came on the system, but I should mention that I assign partition space on a merit system every time I reinstall, and the Windows partition is shrinking.
Anyways, I have a strange problem; no rather I have a strange solution. Up until recently I could never get suspend to disk to work. Everytime I upgraded the kernel or apm utilities, I tried it again and it didn't work. I had heard that if you boot up in Windows and then loadlin into Linux it could work, but I was always too lazy to get loadlin working. Anyways, recently I discovered purely by accident that suspend to disk works perfectly! As far as I can determine, this happened sometime between my upgrade from S.u.S.E. 6.0 (kernel 2.2.5) -> S.u.S.E. 6.1 (kernel 2.2.10). The thing is I didn't see any mention of apm changes in the relevant kernel changelogs, and I'm pretty sure the apm utilities are the same version. So I have two questions:
- was there some change (relevant to suspend) of which I'm not aware?
- which disk space is it using? If it's the Windows suspend space, should I be concerned about it the next time I shrink the Windows partition? (Windows has already earned some bad karma
Okay it was 3 questions.
Anyone have some thoughts?
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Yeah, CDW isn't a favorite among many people...I bought a VAIO from them about a year ago when it was on sale. Got a decent price and the support is good too. Wait, no. That was a dream.
DON'T BUY FROM CDW
I've been thinking of throwing Linux on my laptop (Compaq 1220 - Celeron 200MHz, 32MB of RAM, 2 gig HD) for some time now, but held back because I wasn't sure about the video display. Now that I've found that other page about installing special drivers, I'm leaning heavily. There are just a couple of questions I've got, though:
1. Are the volume control buttons supported under Linux? I'd hate to not be able to listen to anything (primarily because I use the laptop for a lot of MP3ing).
2. There is no two.
Alright, only one question. Sue me.
This page has a post up where some guy started hacking at the MWave. In the first night, he has source that will reconize the address & interrupt.
It also lets you change it. Perhaps he'll have something going soon.
The older news of this page tells of an IBM employee that is secretly working on a driver.
And for a quick fix, this page tells how to use a small DOS partition, DOS drivers, and loadlin to get your sound working 8bit in linux right now.
Hey, it's better than nothing!
Last but not least, this guy wrote the CEO of IBM a letter asking him to release the specs. There is no mention of a reply from this letter.
The letter is on the page though. Go check it out.
I signed your petition. Good luck.
http://www.flexion.org/mwave/hack.shtml
Joseph -- user of Thinkpad 760ED
Civ CTP is awesome! Thanks Loki!
Romans 10:9-10
It's not as simple as releasing drivers, the mwave system is just a dsp chip - the modem and soundcard functions are done in software.
The IBM ThinkPads work really good with linux,
I have ONLY good memmorys from my girlfriends mothers laptop (yeah she run linux and write in TeX she is cool!).
It took me a while to figure out what type of soundcard and graphics device it was (all information from IBM sux). To your knowlage it
is a crystal CS card and neomagic
IMHO the Pentium233 is
the most price-valued ThinkPads on the market, you could probaly get one for $1000 and it can without problem keep up with a PentiumII 233 (did a compile-the-kernel-test).
A month ago I purchased a satellite, my first portable. The satellites were recomended to me by friends who managed to get linux running on them. I used to think that portables were expensive toys before I got my own! Now I love them, great for college. Now I can take my computer with me on trips, the bus etc.
When I was selecting a portable I took a number of features into consideration:
1) price:
Im a college student of Very Litte Money (tm). Every little bit counts.
2) pointing device:
On occasion I do use X and I *hate* *hate* those wretched touch pad pointing devices that I see on so many portables. The 2595 comes with an eraser head pointer. Easy to get used to and you dont have to worry about your hand rubbing on it by accident and moving the pointer where its not wanted.
3) display:
Since i spend > 10 hours a day in front of the computer I had to make a decision: get a large TFT display, or get glasses. The 2595xdvd comes with a 14.1" TFT display (X looks great at 1024x768 on it)
4) SANE keyboard:
I really *hate* *hate* keyboards with those anoying Windows(TM)(C)(R) keys. On a portable they are even worse. Keyboard space is limited. This really "helped" me select the satellite since the "Win keys" on the satellite are very tiny and in the upper right hand of the keyboard (out of the way of hands. yay!)
5) Performance:
Since I needed a portable to serve as my primary workstation, I needed something with an acceptable amount of power. The 2595 comes with 400mhz celeron, 64mb ram (upgradable). This is nore than enough for my needs.
I am fairly satisfied with the 2595xdvd, except for the winmodem. The modem quality is questionable even in windows! The dvd drive wont see much use since its not supported by linux yet. Such is life on the bleeding edge I guess.
At the time of purchase the video card wasnt supported by xfree86 (no idea if it is now) but I managed to get X running at 1024x768 16bpp by using a hacked X server.
I managed to get a full screen console by recompiling the kernel with vesa frame buffer support (by default console is either a *tiny* window in the center of the screen or *ugly* stretch mode. I was very relieved when vesafb worked since I do most of my work in console). I havent been able to get both X and vesafb working at the same time. For some reason X wont start when i have vesafb enabled, so i have to choose between a pretty X environment or a pretty console.
Has anyone with a 2595 got fullscreen console and X working at the same time?
Is there any hope to get the infrared port working?
I have not tried to get sound working under linux. Has anyone got the sound on this portable to work?
Has anyone got a decent looking full screen console to work with the 2595xdvd without using vesafb?
If anyone with a 2595xdvd needs help getting X or a sane console with vesafb working email me and i'll try my best to help you out.
--
intol
intol@linux.nu
Linux might make the old cpus hum, but does it make the old screens any bigger? 10 inch passive matrix screens were the norm in the the 486 days. I am not a screen snob, but I couldn't code for very long on one of those.
Laptops are pricey because a good LCD is pricey. A Celeron 400 CPU cost about a hundred bucks in quantity. A 14 inch screen is in the neighborhood of $800. And unlike anything else in computers, a good screen holds its value much longer.
If your on a budget get a solid, cheap desktop system and a Palm. You'll be a lot happier.
I had a similar problem with my noname notebook. I just couldn't get it to boot. I then tried chos (choose-os, an alternative boot manager), and this one worked at the first try :-) Maybe it works for you too?
It seem from the patches in 2.3.17 that PCMCIA support will get partially integrated in the Linux kernel. That mean that would probably solve the problem with the ones using PCMCIA floopy to install Linux. A great news.
They start about $2249 education and $2499 retail.
http://www.mklinux.org
hey linux and NEC laptops get along fine , there are 2 work arounds for modems , one find an old 33.6 that is a type 3 , or b find and exsternal .
only two solutions i found.
the 33.6 cards that come in type 3 are normaly also pain old modems , no win about them
i havent found any 56k ones out there
I used to run RedHat and Win95 on my laptop, but I had to take RedHat off once X stopped working for some unknown reason. The problem was the console display would space out and wrap in odd patterns so characters were all over the screen, which made it hard to read. Sometimes the text I was trying to read wouldn't even show up and I'd have to hold shift+pgdown until it finally showed up in some sort of semi-legible way. Does anyone know of a patch for this and where I can nab it from?
People keep talking about those things but they look so weak. Every one that I have used or looked at just has a fragile feel it to (look at how the screen is attached). I was always afraid of breaking the thing. When I was doing support, I used a Toshiba Portege with Linux installed. Worked great except for the WinModem internal modem (PCMCIA ether/modem fixed that). The Portege feels solid and is the same size as the VAIO. They are about the same price too.
I use a Compaq Armada 1750 (PII 366) which works ok with linux. The text install of redhat 6 worked flawlessly and the X server was only a matter of going into a vga text mode at boot (vga=791). The only complaints are that the sound system seems to be permanently in 3D mode which distorts some music enough that I can't listen to it and as the article mentioned a winmodem. To get around the win-modem I just use a PCMCIA modem.
I have a IBM 560x. I originally put NT on it, soon switched it to Linux. I find Linux to be a lot less annoying than NT on this 'lil machine.
:-) and NO WINDOWS KEYS!
NT's major weaknesses:
difficult install - this is partially because I am cheap an didn't buy a CD-ROM. Linux network installs are far superior to NT.
Network config changes require reboot. This is a serious PITA when moving from home to work. With Linux I just use hibernation and hardly ever reboot - uptime is 18 days now... Cardctl schemes handle the network resets between home and work.
I'm very happy with RedHat 6.0 on this machine, and the installation was a piece of cake using a PCMCIA ethernet card.
Two advantages of the 560x for Linux: no winmodem (no modem at all
So to all you out there drooling for a Vaio, just remember you may need to by a PCMIA modem anyway, and oh yeah, as far as I can see the Vaio only had one PCMIA slot (if I recall correctly). ... and also bear in mind the Vaio does not have the CDROM drive built-in -- it's external.
I run NetBSD on my VAIO 505G. Sometimes, I use my Ricochet wireless modem and the RealAudio client to listen to broadcast.com stations from far away. I live near Washington, DC and I like to listen to WWOZ in New Orleans.
Last time I went to an Acorn show, there was one company showing off a prototype (called `Peanut') of their RISC OS laptop which ran on a StrongARM. I'm not sure what became of it since I've lost touch with Acorny stuff these days, but that fits the description.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
I'd like to get a laptop w/ DVD drive. Under Linux, will the DVD drive be able to read ordinary CD-ROMs? Also, does XFree86 work on most modern laptops?
I am running RedHat 6.0 on Quantex 1410, which seems to be almost identical to Dell Inspirion 7000. Linux runs like a charm, the only problem is the soundcard, ESS Maestro 2. As far as I know, Alan Cox used to work on the driver, but never finished it. Any ideas how to make it work?
No easier than updating via flash.
And given the nightmares I dealt with at Dell doing reinstalls of hosed Winmodem drivers, I'd rather flash firmware than go through that hell again.
-LjM
My 3000 is 144MB/6.4GB, built entirely without MS intervention. How?
Our very first Linux was on a 486/66 laptop back in 1993 when the fastest big-name laptops were 486/33's or maybe /50's - this was in the days of kernel 0.99.* ... Anyway, the fact that it came with standard hardware from a generic manufacturer meant everything under Linux worked fine - though we had to grab a few drivers off the net that didn't come with the standard Slackware distro. Linux was then and is now perfectly capable of handling the latest laptop hardware - as long as it doesn't include weird proprietary stuff.
Energy: time to change the picture.
What?
With a 486/50 and a 240 meg HD.
I split it into a WFW 3.11 partition and a Caldera 1.3 partition.
It works fine as a slow, low end machine, and as a telnet terminal.
Getting networking working on the Linux side (with an IBM home and away 10baset card, with 14.4 modem) was a pain, I had to figure out the chips involved, but the PCMCIA howto was very helpful, plus there are a few web pages about Thinkpads and Linux.
I may move my mail from the Windows partition to my FreeBSD server, and then just telnet into it to read it, but it nice to be able to go anywhere and just check my mail.
Hooray for the old 486's.
George
Go IBM or Sony. The NeoMagic graphics chipset (pretty popular among laptops) is supported out-of-box in RH6.0 or the drivers are online. No Windows keys. There is a winmodem and the sound card is still beta for drivers, but everything else is superb. My next Linux laptop will be a ThinkPad.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I have a Prostar 8250 notebook, which kicks total ass. the only problem i have is that i cannot get it to boot from the HDD. it doesnt seem to even check the HDD. ive played with bios settings etc. the bios just immediately ask me to insert bootable media. saw one post on the news groups about this, but no reply. TIA!
I own a Compaq 1275 K6-366 running pure linux (AMD and Linux, the ultimate against the Wintel duopoly). I like it. In fact I use it more than I use my desktop. Sure it has a winmodem, but my Linksys 100baseTX/56k fax/modem takes care of that. (Oh and 40 feet of ethernet cable makes it effectively wireless) I had no problem getting linux up under it. The only things I can't get to work under it are:
The scroll buttons for the mouse.
Those 4 "internet ready" buttons you find on compaqs
Some of the "Fn" key's functions like CD playing. (As far as I can tell the "Fn" gets intercepted by the BIOS because it doesn't return a scan key.)
If anyone knows how to get them to work, I'd like to know, but it's not that big of a deal.
The one thing that does piss me off a bit is that my NeoMagic card can only be run at 800x600, which is just a bit too big.
Setting those up that type of hardware under a PC Unix requires some type of support on behalf of the hardware supporting that the unix already supports, such as the ESS being soundblaster compatable..
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
On the other side of the hardware world, I am running LinuxPPC on my 333 MHz PowerPC G3 laptop, and it works beautifully. 90+% of everything I try works (some oddnesses with hot-swapping devices in the media bay, e.g.). It is quite a nice machine for fast computation (running OpenDX and such).