Taking the plunge

[Duane Attaway]

On Thu, 23 May 2002, J. Mike Needham wrote:

> I am about to configure my Toshiba Laptop (satellite)
> with RH 7.3 this evening. I am planning to run Wine to
> run my few Windows Apps that I "just can't live
> without".  Was hoping that someone has had some
> experience with a Toshiba and can give me a heads up
> on the problems I might encounter.

What satellite are you using?  Mine is a 2805-S603 and ran RH7.2 since I
bought it in September until last week's Gentoo install.  There were a few
things I needed to change and it has worked without incident since.  
Since I haven't done a writeup of my experience with this laptop, here it
goes (long :)

The install from RH's 7.1 discs worked great if I used the VESA screen
drivers.  My video chipset didn't work with xfree86's default nv driver
and required going to NVidia's website to download their drivers.  
Despite my previous headaches with binary drivers, I have not had an
incident with these.  They provide convenient RPM packages, including
SRPM's with rebuildable kernel wrappers for custom kernels.  Easy to
install and the speed is unreal.  XFree with this driver has given me 100%
reliability with no crashes, except for...

The window managers provided by redhat have always been a different story
when reliability is needed.  If it failed, I found I could kill the window
manager and a new window manager could be started, such as an older
version of enlightenment or the trusty twm.  The exeption to killing the
window manager would be if it was run under gdm (redhat's default runlevel
5) and gdm would act like a watchdog and mercilessly kill everything.  I 
eventually removed redhat's bloated default X11 tree and rebuilt from 
scratch, installing a slightly older bug-free version of enlightenment.  
This is how I have been able to be 100% crash free over the months.

Sound had a few annoying issues until kernel-2.5, I think.  About 80% of
reboots had an annoying whistle from the speakers.  It is fixed now and
sound works great. RH7.3 should have all these issues fixed and provide a
great multimedia experience.

Playing DVD's was not an issue and can work with the CPU underclocked to 
250MHz with some skipped frames to save batteries.

Speaking of batteries.  No APM support, except for screen blanking.  This
is the only serious problem.  ACPI is being worked on and it is looking
great with kernel-2.4.19-pre8-ac4.  I haven't tried the swap to disk patch
yet, but I hear that mode is supported.  With ACPI, you can browse the
/proc/acpi tree and find out useless trivia like how many milliamps your
batteries have stored, available, how many milliamp-hours your CPU have
used, the calculated time left for things to run, and other bizzare facts.  
ACPI is a fun toy to play with when I am bored.

The laptop can run for 3 hours with the screen blanked when the CPU is
chewing away on a HALT instruction.  Start crunching numbers and this will
be reduced to one hour.  The fan makes a great source of hot air for the
cooler months of the year.  Power consumption ranges from about 20-60 
watts, depending on load.  The toys in the /proc/acpi/ tree will give 
clues what runs up the electric bill.

Toshiba still makes good laptops good enough for industrial use.  I
demonstrated this on accident a few months ago when it took a belly-flop
from the desk onto the hardwood floor.  No damage, but the battery poped
out.  Good thing it was still plugged in: it was still on and happily
playing mp3's.  Couldn't lose that precious uptime...

> The Apps for Wine are:
> 
> IE 6
> Trillian
> Flash MX
> Photoshop 6.1 with Alien Skin EC4000
> Illustrator

I haven't used wine in years, but I hear its pretty good these days.  The
search engines and newsgroups were great when finding ways to get the
latest apps to run.

> 
> Everything else I am planning to run native.
> 
> Would also like a suggestion on good CDRW software
> that is Linux native.

I have always used the trusty command line interface of cdrecord, but
gentoo's source tree shows me these packages to try.  Xcdroast has been
around for quite some time and I liked it, but you have a choice:

arson cdbakeoven cddump cdrtools gcombust k3b kreatecd xcdroast bchunk
cdcat cdrdao cdrx gtoaster koncd simplecdrx dvdrip

Hope this helps!

> Do You Yahoo!?

Yes, I do yahoo sometimes.

-- 
-=Duane
0x00F4  Kansas City, Missouri
http://www.attaway.org           Why drive a car when you can ride a bike?