[tlug] Notebook Question

[<mocm@example.com>]

Jim Breen writes:
 > G'day All,
 > 
 > Well today my wife came home to find a hole in the roof, the 
 > manhole into the ceiling open, and a couple of things missing,
 > including my Toshiba notebook. FORTUNATELY I had spent much of
 > Monday making zipped tarball backups to CD, so the loss of
 > data is not dramatic, however I am about to buy a new notebook.
 > 
 > Two questions from this:
 > 
 > - looking at the "brandname" models I see that there are equivalent
 > systems from Compaq, Toshiba and IBM. (256M, 20Gb, etc.)  Does
 > anyone have any comments on the suitability, ease of installation, etc.
 > for Linux (e.g. RH7.3)?

Have a look at 
http://www.linux-laptop.net/ or http://mobilix.org/mylaptops.html
for reports on various notebooks and Linux compatibility.
I have had a number of notebooks, but not from the companies that
you are asking about (namely Sony, Apple, Hitachi, Sharp, Canon,
noname). I am currently looking at the Compaq Presario 905EA and the
Asus L3800C (without OS) for my next notebook, mainly because they
have an ATI M7 graphics chipset. (Those numbers are for the German
models, they may differ). I may also wait until something like the
Fujitsu P series is available in Germany, because I would like to have
a Transmeta powered notebook. 

 > 
 > - some come with XP. I think I need to leave a basic Win partition
 > as laptops seem to need various config utilities installed there. Does
 > anyone have useful experience to share about shrinking the partition
 > with XP?

Used to be no problem with partition magic, but I haven't tried it in
a while. There are also some open source programs that can do it. It
depends on the filesystem your other OS uses. 

Even if the shrinking doesn't work, most notebooks come with a
recovery CD, so that you can play back the other OS after
repartitioning.

Marcus

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| Dr. Marcus O.C. Metzler        |                                   |
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| mocm@example.com            | http://www.metzlerbros.de/        |
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