Hi all ... just dropping in for a moment...
Dozer said:
Let me know how it goes. I'm interested in possibly running Linux on the Toshiba laptop at some point. I have DragonLinux installed on one of my desktop systems as sort of a Linux learning experience, but I think I'd eventually like to try it on the Toshiba to see what kind of difference it makes in efficency.
Dozer, I just finished my Linux install. As of today, here's my laptop's configuration:
IBM ThinkPad 560:
Pentium 100 MHz processor
24 MB RAM (will perhaps be upgraded to the max 72MB RAM)
6 GB IBM Travelstar hard disk (upgraded from the original 810 MB disk; see Hypermicro's website for some good options)
Linksys 10/100 (yeah, right) PC Card ethernet adapter (model PCM100)
Dual-booting Windows 98 Second Edition and RedHat Linux 7.3 (via GRUB)
The first thing I did after installing the 6 GB hard disk was to roughly partition it in half. I had everything I needed to install Windows 98 SE, so I did that right away. I used a parallel port Zip drive to copy the required files from the Win98SE CD onto a temporary partition on the hard disk.
I didn't have the time to think about Linux at that point, so for the past few weeks I've used this laptop as a Windows-only system. I've been really amazed at how well Win98SE is running on it. It's completely usable. That said, with only 24 MB of RAM, if I plan to continue using "big" applications like Mozilla I'm going to upgrade the RAM. But the OS itself and even things like the OpenOffice suite run extraordinarily well with only very rare hard disk thrashing.
Given how well Windows 98SE ran, I figured I'd go whole hog with a Linux distribution and get the latest version of whatever distribution I decided on.
I considered Debian and RedHat because both have the option for relatively straightforward network installations. (Remember, this laptop only has an external floppy drive - there is no CD ROM drive, nor any USB ports.)
I decided to go with RedHat because I've had some prior experience with it and because it seems to get mentioned most often in conjunction with the word "laptop", especially "IBM laptop".
The network install went incredibly well. Just two floppy disks was all it took. One to start the boot process, and the other to supply the PCMCIA network card drivers. Of course, this was after about 2 hours spent figuring out how to add the driver information for my particular Linksys ethernet adapter, because it wasn't recognized by the default driver disk.
The installation process took several hours (the fault of a slow network connection as much as anything), but it installed all the components I wanted right over the Internet from one of the RedHat mirror FTP sites. I was really impressed.
So that's it, you ask? Two floppy disks and a few hours and you've now got a completely functional, dual-booting laptop?
Not quite.
After spending a few hours last night and most of today looking into it, I've discovered that at some point during the great open-source transition from XFree86 3.x to XFree86 4.x, support for the video chip that happens to be in my laptop was screwed up. As a result, I can't run X-windows.
I'm going to post a message to the XFree86 support list at some point, asking if there's anyway to restore the functionality that apparently used to be offered for my video chip in the 3.x days. If not, then I'm going to tell the webmaster of the XFree86 site to update their "compatible hardware" list to reflect the fact that my particular chip won't work with >= 4.0.
My final conclusion? It's been worth it, even if all I do is stick with Windows. I might try an older Linux distribution that uses XFree86 3.3.x to get X running on this thing. But later. It's just been too much "fun" for one weekend, you know?
The only other minor thing is that I discovered this particular laptop only supports 8-bit color (i.e. 256 colors). But that's way better than some of the computers I've used in my life, so I'm not complaining.
