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F16PilotJumper
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 07, 2004 10:36 pm    Post subject: Cheap Laptop / Gentoo Combo? Reply with quote

So, I'm here at college, and I've quickly realized that I could really use a laptop in addition to my main desktop machine.

Now, I'm a cheapskate - my desktop box itself is a $800 'Barton 2500 Budget' machine. It does what I need, it's speedy, and I like it. I can play all the games I want on my Windows partition and Gentoo loves the thing.

What I'm really looking for is a laptop in the sub-$500 range that will let me install Gentoo with basic apps, listen to music, etc. I know one guy in our campus open source group (most use Gentoo) who actually still uses an old 233mhz Dell, with a Wifi add-on PC Card.

I've been looking on eBay and considering a P3 in the 500mhz-1ghz range, with a minimum of 128MB of RAM. Preferably a Dell or IBM, because it'll be used and those brands seem to hold up the best.

Any comments? Suggestions? Things to avoid? My experience with laptops is admittedly quite limited, and I leapfrogged from a K6-233 to an Athlon 1.14ghz in the desktop range a couple years back, so I kinda missed that whole generation of CPUs.
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RevolutionaryIconoclast
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 07, 2004 10:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Don't get a compaq, dell, hewlett packard, or a few other brands. I'm on a compaq right now and my graphics processor isn't officially supported. Was really annoying to get 3D, took me a few months(perhaps even half a year) to figure it out.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 12:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Stay away from Dell. I have a Dell and a it was a pain getting X to work on it since the BIOS limited Video Ram to 1MB, I needed to get a hack that would reset the video ram size to a decent amount.

Try IBM Thinkpads, I think that IBM supports Linux on their laptops, I'm not sure though.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 1:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

My Dell Inspiron 3000 (P1 266) works just fine, except for very bizarre DMA errors and other wierd things, but I'm convinced that's hardware related (its at least second-hand, possibly more)
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 1:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Huh? I've worked on 2 Dell laptops (an 8200 and an old Latitude) and both worked damn fine with Gentoo...
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F16PilotJumper
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 1:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

266? How does that work out for you?

If I could get away with say a 500mhz vs a 1ghz, that would be great.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 4:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Some of the Inspiron 1100's that have onboard video cards have the faulty BIOS. Dell decided to scrap the original BIOS for some of their laptops and created their own. Their new BIOS however broke alot of working things. There are alot of upset users on the Dell forums, especially since some of the users had perfectly fine laptops, but once they upgraded to the new BIOS many things stopped working. Sadly due to the nature of the BIOS upgrade, users can't even downgrade.

Dell laptops are cheap though, so if you do decide to get one be careful about the model and the BIOS. Good luck.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 5:25 am    Post subject: Re: Cheap Laptop / Gentoo Combo? Reply with quote

F16PilotJumper wrote:
I've been looking on eBay and considering a P3 in the 500mhz-1ghz range, with a minimum of 128MB of RAM.

I have a Dell Inspiron 5000e that has been running Gentoo for the past year. It has a 700 MHz P3 and it's decently fast, although no speed demon. To give you an idea, 2.6 kernel compiles take about 45 minutes, and emerging KDE took me a good 24 hours from beginning to end.

I would not necessarily recommend getting a Dell, primarily because I think their build quality is pretty bad.

I would strongly recommend, however, that you get as much RAM as you possibly can. I had 128 MB of RAM in this laptop, and bumped it up to 512 MB, which is the max for this particular laptop. Adding RAM really helped with boosting performance. Prior to addding RAM, there was a lot of disk swapping, which really slows things down on a laptop, due to the relative slowness of the laptop hard drive compared to most desktops.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 7:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree with wilburpan. RAM is more determent of laptop speed than it's processor.

I have a HP Omnibook XE3 (first model of that line). It's a Celeron 550 with 128MB. It runs XFCE4, and does very well. It really impresses classmates that my laptop responds faster than their laptops (they all have about 2.4 Ghz or 2500+'s in their laptops). I even got one to convert to gentoo :).

Offcourse compiling was a bitch, so I put distcc on it, and let my desktop compile for it. That really helps.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 7:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i have a toshiba myself, brand new, havnt had a single problem with it, gentoo had no problems, niether did slackware..

as for older toshiba laptops, my girlfriend has a 300mhz one, and its still kickin ass and taking names, cant speak to it on the linux part though, as her hard drive is so small we cant dual boot it..

only drawback on that old laptop is the mouse 'nipple' , its not a touchpad :(
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 7:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've got a Thinkpad, works beautifully. IBM has a nifty site where you can see which of their laptops have been linux-certified. Too bad they don't have Gentoo listed, but I guess it's all the same.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 10:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Boris27 wrote:
I agree with wilburpan. RAM is more determent of laptop speed than it's processor.

I have a HP Omnibook XE3 (first model of that line). It's a Celeron 550 with 128MB. It runs XFCE4, and does very well.


I have 300Mhz P2-laptop, and I run KDE3.2 on it ;). Although I have more RAM than you do (320MB). KDE runs pretty well on that machine.
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F16PilotJumper
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 2:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The one thing that bugs me about the laptop market today is all the Celeron 2.4ghz machines. The new Celerons 2.xs are slower then Duron 1.6, and WAY slower then Barton 2500+ in the desktop or mobile form. Yet, all the bargin laptops have crappy Celerons 2.xs - I even say an ad for to "upgrade" a new machine from a "Barton 2500+ Mobile (runs at 1.83ghz) to a Celeron 2.6ghz for $250" - what a ripoff!

I'd rather spent $500 on a good used laptop and $150 on beefing up the RAM then $650 to get a useless, crippled machine with a Celeron 2.4. Although in reality, $300-$400 is probably what I'd pay on the laptop itself.

Anyway, I've been seeing a lot of Thinkpad 600-series P3s on eBay. I really wish there was a local place where I could go look at some though, like a hardware clearinghouse for government used stuff or something. It'd make this a lot easier.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

F16PilotJumper wrote:
Yet, all the bargin laptops have crappy Celerons 2.xs - I even say an ad for to "upgrade" a new machine from a "Barton 2500+ Mobile (runs at 1.83ghz) to a Celeron 2.6ghz for $250" - what a ripoff!

Intel's marketing army at work...
They know all that matters to the average shopper is which has a bigger number next to it.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If I had enough money to get a laptop, I would get an eMachines 64 bit notebook!

Chadders :P
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 4:49 pm    Post subject: Yeah... Reply with quote

It's too bad the whole thing backfires when Intel then turns around and tries to convince people that the Pentium-M 1.4ghz is faster then the Celeron, really it is...
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 5:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Get a used powerbook or ibook. The are more likely to bee in good condition. Thinkpads are ok too. Don't get a dell. Dells fall appart so they are a bad idea, especially for a secondhand lappy.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 5:55 pm    Post subject: Re: Yeah... Reply with quote

F16PilotJumper wrote:
It's too bad the whole thing backfires when Intel then turns around and tries to convince people that the Pentium-M 1.4ghz is faster then the Celeron, really it is...

But it's Centrino technology! It has to be better! :roll:
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F16PilotJumper
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 7:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I can't believe that Dells fall apart, but I'll take your word for it. Leaning towards IBM anyway because I've just always wanted a Thinkpad.

Of course, Centrino > Celeron because it has more letters! :P

Anyone have any experience with IBM Thinkpad 600X's @500mhz?
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 8:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Not with that particular model, but I know that Thinkpads have a reputation of being durable laptops that can take a punch and are good on the hardware side of things.

Evangelion: I might put KDE3.2 on it (I really like it on my desktop, been a Gnome guy before), but just loading XFCE4 and X only takes up about 40 megs. That leaves a lot open to use something like oowriter or jedit.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 9:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

F16PilotJumper wrote:
I can't believe that Dells fall apart, but I'll take your word for it. Leaning towards IBM anyway because I've just always wanted a Thinkpad.

Of course, Centrino > Celeron because it has more letters! :P

Anyone have any experience with IBM Thinkpad 600X's @500mhz?


Yes, i have had experience with the IBM Thinkpad 600s, mine is a p3 500 mhz, and it has 192 mb of ram... i had mandrake on it, and it ran GREAT with kde 3.1... if you opted to get one of those i would say all the way!
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 9:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

BTW, i payed about $500 US for it. Great deal, it had been leased by a company and then it was sold to who i bought it from, and it runs like a dream. Of course, this was ~2 years ago, so they might be less nowadays :)
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 9:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

got a toshiba here, runs damn fine, its got arch linux on it current, it has had suse *fine*, redhat 8 *fine* and gentoo *fanastic*. i do need to redo it for gentoo actually i just cant face 21hrs of compiling *sigh* stupid celeron. but it ran damn fine once it was all setup :)
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F16PilotJumper
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 10:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm leaning away from Toshiba, simply because my dad has had three of them for his company, and all have had some kind of problems (cooling fan didn't work, generally sluggish, etc).
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 11:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
266? How does that work out for you?

Well, it works fine for me, word processing (Abiword), web browsing (Firefox), email, image viewing. Pretty much it. Oh, and Fluxbox.
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