laptop question

[Leo J Mauler]

On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 14:51:38 -0600 Brian Kelsay <bkelsay at comcast.net>
writes:
> Rick Franklin wrote:
> 
> > SUSE 9.0 does not appear to be as user friendly on 
> > the laptop as it is on the desktop, where there are still 
> > a few minor problems with minor applications.
> >
> > On the laptop (Toshiba Tecra / Pent. 600 / 256 RAM), 
> > there is a 1 1/2" black border around the viewable 
> > display, and the speakers play static. Have played with 
> > display properties and tried to enlarge the display in 
> > Sax ... no budge. 

You might want to try a virtual display which is a lot bigger than the
viewable display.

I've gotten a few systems to run on 640x480 monitors with a virtual
display set to 1024x768.

> > PCMCIA well supported. A few other  minor 
> > irritations.

Feel lucky.  Getting Linux to run on laptops is a piecemeal operation,
and anyone who successfully gets it to run properly on a laptop is
someone who has worked on it for days, weeks, months.

> > Google led to a few pages and posts where Mandrake 
> > and Red Hat were touted as having better laptop support.  
> > One Mandrake page listed this model as supported.

Always pick a distro which allows a graceful fallback to XFree86 v3.3.6
if necessary.  There aren't enough drivers for the older hardware for
XFree86 v4.

Unfortunately this means that Slackware is no longer supportive of older
hardware.  Slackware 8.0 and higher no longer includes XFree86 v3.3.6. 
If you still have Slackware 7.1 lying around, you can drop everything but
X from the Slackware 8.0 or better CDROM, then install Slackware 7.1's
XFree86 v3.3.6 packages.

> > Any thoughts on best distro(s) for laptops? Life is okay 
> > on the WIN 98 side ... just looking for justification to 
> > make this unit all Linux. 
> 
> You may have to combine instructions you find from several 
> sources to get everything configured as I have.  There is no 
> guarantee that any distro is the best at everything.  I wish they 
> would all get together on supporting all the old hardware.  
> Have to admit though that Redhat has been pretty good w/ 
> autodetection.  You might try Knoppix or Morphix (Debian 
> underneath) as a bootable CD on your laptop and see how it 
> does.  I'm using Morphix and and it's pretty good.  I just got 
> my wireless card working and next need to work on Sound.  
> Tuesday I'm going to try to get a USB webcam going on it.   
> This is an old laptop (233) that doesn't have very much info 
> out about it.  Good Luck.

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