Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 19:57:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Dale Wharton <dwharton@alcor.concordia.ca> To: Jon Hamilton <hamilton@pobox.com> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: cheapest laptop for FreeBSD? winmodems? Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.4.10.10008021934160.15401-100000@alcor.concordia.ca> In-Reply-To: <20000802041505.417C71D@woodstock.monkey.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Jon, many thanks for your very constructive remarks. Your aside about winmodems rang my bell (internet access is essential for my purpose). Which raises another question: how does one learn in advance if a modem is a winmodem? The only literature that I saw, a brief spec sheet on the Compaq Presario 1200-XL115, says simply "Modem 56kbps with V.90 Support." Regards ... -- _ Dale Wharton ve2ndw@rac.ca M O N T R E A L Te souviens-tu? On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Jon Hamilton wrote: > Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 23:15:05 -0500 > From: Jon Hamilton <hamilton@pobox.com> > > [...] > > I have one of those (Compaq 1200-XL) and while I agree that their reputation > isn't the best as far as hardware compatibility goes, I will say that getting > FreeBSD running on it wasn't hard at all. The built in modem is a winmodem, > so that's useless, but aside from that everything appears to work fine -- I > don't have any USB stuff, but the controller is detected at boot and I assume > that would work if the need arose. The builtin sound did require a patch; > it doesn't work out of the box yet. See www.inode.org/sw/auvia/ if you > buy one of these and want to use sound. > > Having said all of that, I use mine as a dual boot machine with W98, mainly > so my son can watch DVDs while traveling in the car :) Getting a "regular" > W98 installed on it was a horse of a completely different color. I don't > use Windows much, nor do I know much about it, so my progress was probably > slower than would have been the case for someone used to Windows, but even > so it took me 4 solid days to hunt down all the drivers and weirdo custom > pieces I needed to run a non-Compaq supplied copy of W98. Also, beware that > they ship with a rescue disk which is a pathetic joke -- they partition > the disk into two volumes, and the rescue disk depends upon the stuff they > had on the D: drive being there in order to be of any use! > > The screen on the compaq is noticibly better (crisper, brighter, and in most > cases, larger) than the other laptops in the same price range at the time I > was shopping, which was really the main reason I opted to buy it. > > So in summary, it's pretty good as a FreeBSD-only machine, a bit of a pain > if you want to dual boot. Take that for whatever it's worth :) > > -- > Jon Hamilton > hamilton@pobox.com > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.OSF.4.10.10008021934160.15401-100000>