Re: Used ones

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Date: 25 Oct 2005 23:13:23 GMT

Simon wrote:

> Hi there,
> I'm looking to get a used portable computer, but since I never used
> one I wonder if there is anything specific about them I should know?
>
> I will be installing Slackware and will need to have a 3D accelerated
> video card, about 128MB of ram, a disk of at least 10-15G and a
> cd-rom. CPU speed is not important, at least 200Mhz should be fine
> for me! ;)
>
> How can I know if it will be compatible or not (or should I care
> about compatibility at all?).
>
> I'd like to know if there are anything specific to the portable
> technology in Linux (things to install/configure and then know how to
> use them, like the battery stuff, etc...)
>
> Thanks for starting pointers,
> Simon

Awhile back I purchased a Thinkpad T23 from overstock.com and thought
it was a great value. It has a 1.1ghz P3 processor and it came with
128mb of memory and a 10g hard disk drive. You can find a lot of
information on the linux laptops website including what people have
done to get things working. The T23 works very well these days but
when I got it I had a few issues with ACPI but those seem to have
disappeared with some of the newer kernels and suspends/sleep events
work very nicely. I also have seen some with intel 2200 abg minipci
cards in them which have an open source driver.

All told, I purchased the laptop for around 700.00 and it came with a
CD/rw drive I believe. I upgraded the hard disk drive to 80g for
around 150.00 and bought a memory upgrade for around 90.00.

The ACPI stuff may take a bit of work but I think you can find a lot of
great help on the linux thinkpad mailing list and the thinkwiki. It
details a lot of the ways/means to get things like acpi, wifi, etc
working. The integrated ethernet card just works fine with the e100
driver. I did have some problems initially with the modem but I rarely
use a modem these days so it was not a major pain.

I also have a Dell Inspiron 4100 that is very similar to the Thinkpad.
It has a Pentium III 1.1ghz with 512mb of memory and an 80g drive. It
also works very well with Linux and APM these days. At the current
time it runs XP for some work stuff I need and I run VMware workstation
on it with Fedora Core 4 as a guest. It does VMware well albiet a bit
slowly.

-- 
Michael Perry | Do or do not. There is no try --Master Yoda
mperry@lnxpowered.org | http://www.lnxpowered.org

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