Re: debian on a laptop?
Will-
I was in the same situation (2nd year in college, cash is in short supply
:) ), I
ended up buying a used IBM Thinkpad reasonably cheap.
> Anyway, I was thinking that a laptop 486 DX/4 100 with 16 megs of ram
> ought to run ok, considering that I probably won't bother trying to run X
Actually, mine is a 486/75 w/ 12 Megs, and I run X (w/ fvwm2 as a window
manager) on it. I wouldn't try Netscape, but for basic (xterm,
nedit, even compiling w/ gcc/g++ for CS classes, etc.)
applications it works fine w/ X up. I do drop back to command line for
more intensive things though...
> My concerns are things like PCMCIA drivers and
> things -- I'd need both a PCMCIA modem and an ethernet card. Are there
> problems with either of these devices in linux/Debian in general on
> laptops? Are there any other concerns I should have about running Debian
> on a laptop?
I haven't (personally) had the chance to use the PCMCIA drivers under
my Debian setup (haven't found a cheap enough Ethernet card, SLIPped it
to my desktop instead), but I've seen them in action on two friends'
laptops (one RedHat, one Slackware) and was impressed.
As far as other concerns, I can't think of any. The Debian install was
incredibly straightforward and easy, and the fact that the entire base fit
on five floppies was especially nice (the laptop has no CDROM). In fact,
because the laptop worked so well, I ended up converting my desktop
to Debian about 3 weeks later :) .
Good luck...
-Brian
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