9 replies to this topic

[LeeBoy]

Here is a 2 part article on Linux and the laptop

part one

h++p://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6684

part two

h++p://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6742

[White_Raven]

All it really comes down to is knowing your hardware; If your lappy is a crapaq (read compaq or newer hp)bit of total crap then your not going to have much luck, if however your lappy is a toshiba or some other brand that uses real nice standards compilent hardware (like SOME Dell stuff.. not all)then it will be allot easyer on you.. the one thing I hate and just have to bitch about is that mostly these days the modem that is inherently installed in most lappys today are all controlerless winho based hunks of crap that are NOT standards complient and as such will not work well if at all with *nix.. so do your research and get to know your hardware, even if its the only box you know that well, its still going to save your ass some trouble in the end... its worth the time taken.

[kid_e]

That's not necessarily true about Compaq. I gotta steal on a 715US and am running Mandrake 9 without any problems. It has support for video, audio, pcmcia, usb, and sound. The recent cooker release of the 2.4.20 kernel provides full acpi compatability (including cpu throttling and cooling fan on/off). It's got full networking (internal nic) and wireless (through pcmcia) support. There's a driver for the internal modem. And as soon as I get Dreamweaver working under wine, I'm nuking my XP partition.

[White_Raven]

Well my main experiance with comap stuff is the older and the almost new stuff.. So perhaps i am wrong when it come to the bleeding edge stuff, but in my experiance they like to use allot of propritary hardware that are harder to configure.. then again if your doing things the easy way with mandrake then your not going to have as many problems, however if your installing slackware with its alwys out of date libs (stable but not exactly new, ever in my experiance, thats always the first thing I do is update libs after install so i can build stuff.) its goign to be harder.

[kid_e]

You're right about the newer stuff. But since, for example, Sony's notebooks have a 3 month production run, they are always on the edge of linux support. And why I use Mandrake for mine.

[dual]

All you need is

http://www.linuxcare.com/labs/certs/

[feend]

And of course.

http://www.linux-laptop.net

[White_Raven]

The really sad thing, is rigth now I have a AST acentia j-20 with a 509 meg harddrive, 8 megs of ram and a p100 cpu.. and its running winho95a, I m ashamed to admit.. just cant use it for anything really past text editing I was thinking about turning it into a cygwin box, but the compilers dont work right under anything less then winho98 due to compatability problems... or so it says. That and it doesnt work well.. but it was almost free so no lose.

[kid_e]

I'm sure there's a distro you could run on that.

It amazes me how little disk space and memory my Linux install uses compared to the XP install. Big difference.

[White_Raven]

Well rigth now its not working anyway so it doesnt matter.. I think it may have something to do with the power intake and the dead battery.. The cable is as old as the lappy, so that may be it.