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.
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.
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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.
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.
I'm assuming that you've installed linux before, on your desktop or something, so the basics aren't new to you.
/dev/hda5)
Dual Boot: no problem there, Install NT first (already done I guess), use fips or Partition Magic to shrink the NT partition and create some empty space for linux, don't let linux install lilo on the mbr, instead to the beginning of the partition linux is on, then dd the bootsector to a file (dd if=/dev/hdxn of="bootsect.lin" bs=521 n=1) where x is the drive letter, n is the partition number, probably
3Com 10/100+56K I've had great luck with this card, although the modem and the ethernet won't work at the same time all that well.
Video is going to be your biggest problem, and I suggest just going out and doing a web search on altavista or something for your notebook name and linux and X or something like that. Someone probably already has a working XF86Config file for you.
Installing linux is tricky on machines with PCMCIA floppy drives, but I'm assuming this computer has a built in floppy drive, so it should be okay.
-nosilA
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).