Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 23:15:05 -0500 From: Jon Hamilton <hamilton@pobox.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Dale Wharton <dwharton@alcor.concordia.ca>, FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: cheapest laptop for FreeBSD? Message-ID: <20000802041505.417C71D@woodstock.monkey.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Aug 2000 13:17:37 %2B0930." <20000802131737.H36094@wantadilla.lemis.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In message <20000802131737.H36094@wantadilla.lemis.com>, Greg Lehey wrote: } [following up on FreeBSD-questions] } } On Tuesday, 1 August 2000 at 22:28:01 -0400, Dale Wharton wrote: } > I bought the 3rd edition of THE COMPLETE FREEBSD by Greg Lehey, } } ... which suggests (on page 15) that you'll get help from } FreeBSD-questions. It's right :-) } } > it includes discs labeled March 2000. Now I need a computer (it } > must be portable) to run it on. } > } > The cheapest new laptop I can find hereabouts is the Compaq Presario } > 1200-XL115, whose (475 MHz) processor is the AMD-K6-2 --not } > mentioned in the book. Is it a suitable platform? If not, what is } > the cheapest portable that does support FreeBSD? } } Compaq doesn't have the best reputation for compatibility. In } general, you'll find people prefer Dell. I don't know of any problems } with this machine myself, but others may. The K6 isn't a problem, but } with laptops, typically display and sound hardware are sore points. 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?20000802041505.417C71D>