Re: Nightstand Terminal
* Stephen Patterson <s.patterson@freeuk.com> [2004 Dec 09 09:31 -0600]:
> Probably anything thats not too recent would work well, though for
> your purposes I'd suggest an IBM Thinkpad 760EL, ok, thats a P1 with a
> 2 gig disc but this model doesn't have any fans so the only noise is
> the hard drive (which won't keep you awake). THe other good news with
> one of these is that it uses real APM so your power management will
> just work :)
I think I would stay away from the 760EL unless you find that you can
drive it with a greater than 8 bit color depth in X. I played with two
and could only get 800x600x8 bpp out of each. Any attempt to drive
either at 16 bpp resulted in an ugly grey hash along the bottom of the
screen. I tried to use XFree 4.x on an EL and wasn't successful. My
time was limited so I didn't waste much trying to make it work and I
set the box back to XFree 3.3.x
I have a 760ED that is working very well except sound isn't supported
(it's an Mwave chip) nor the built-in modem. It's clumsy in that the
floppy and CDROM are an either/or situation. The screen isn't bad at
12" @ 1024x768.
I bought a Thinkpad 390E a couple of years back and it's been a
day-to-day warrior. All the hardware is supported and working well,
USB, PCMCIA, APM, sound, video @ 1024x768 on a 14.1" screen, Lucent
modem with the ltmodem driver that someone is helpfully building
packages for the Debian kernels, CDROM, Floppy, and that's about it.
I've not played with IRDA on it so I can't comment on it. It boots
from CD so I can play with Knoppix, Morphix, Slax, etc. They should be
much cheaper now but I suspect it's become more difficult to find a
clean used one.
- Nate >>
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