Re: Debian on laptops; recommended?
dark@xs4all.nl (Richard Braakman) writes:
> Can any happy (or unhappy) Debian-on-laptop users help me here with
> information?
I'd say it depends a lot on the laptop in question. My own notebook is a
slightly dated IPC PortaPC 5 with a 486DX33 processor, 8 MB RAM, 700 MB
disk and a WD90C24A graphics controller. Debian runs just fine and dandy
on that machine. At the university, we have two notebooks which are
basically Texas Instruments workalikes with a Pentium-133 and 40 MB RAM,
and they are great Debian machines -- I'm using one of them as my libc6
development machine, actually. The only thing about these is that the
display is based on a Cirrus Logic chip which doesn't appear to be very
well-supported by XFree86; I have to use an older version of the server
which is the only one that seems stable. (The XFree people say that the
particular driver hasn't been tested a lot.)
In a nutshell, you will want to check carefully which graphics chip the
computer is using, since this is the area with the most
incompatibilities. Another thing that might be problematic is APM, as
not all notebooks implement APM completely within the BIOS -- some do
the power management stuff under Windows only. The current boot disks
won't allow you to install over PCMCIA ethernet or off a PCMCIA SCSI
bus, AFAIK, but this seems to be worked on.
There is a `Linux Laptop Page' on the WWW which will be easy to find
through Altavista etc.
I don't really think this is a topic for debian-private so have Cc:-ed
this answer to debian-user (which I don't have time to read myself :^().
Anselm
--
Anselm Lingnau ......................... lingnau@tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them.
--- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)
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