(The white sticker to the lower right is not standard, I assume it was a
auction ticket)
(The white sticker to the lower right is not standard, I assume it was a
auction ticket)
Weighing in at around 4 pounds, with a battery life of 2:50 running windows, or 4:20 running linux, (with all the power saving measures enabled, hard drive spun down, just using vi) this is ideal for my purposes.
Reverting to slackware 3.3 solved that.
First I used FIPS to repartition the disk to 50/50 windows/linux
Installation was by using the bare.i and color.gz bootdisks, rawritten from dos, there were no problems with the floppy drive.
Once that was done, I copied files onto a PCMCIA hard drive, from a CD, using my desktop, then copied the A set onto the hard disk using windows, booted using the floppies, installed the A set, booted, and then installed the rest directly from the PCMCIA drive.
(I have not explored booting from the PCMCIA drive, though that would be an interesting experiment)
If update is re-tuned to only write dirty buffers to the hard drive occasionally, then it can be a while between spinups. (I've compiled quite a lot, without the hard drive ever waking up)
Putting all your binaries on a read only mounted partition, or at least mounting the partition they are on with the noatime, and nodiratime flags, will also reduce disk usage a little, as the disk won't spin up to rewrite access times on programs.
Files used:
Kernel 2.0.34
Mergemem - finds identical bits of RAM, and makes them into one bit, saving memory
e2fs compression for 2.0 kernels
A version of e2fsck that MUST be installed if using the above
X server: the SVGA server knows about the c&t chipset used in this, so setup is dead easy. There is also no need to bother with modelines, as the screen only supports 640x480, 16 and 24bpp work, though I'm running in 8bpp most of the time, to get the biggest virtual desktop, as this is limited to about 800*600 in 16bpp, and 640x480 in 24bpp.
PCMCIA support: using version 3.04, though the one that came with Slackware 3.3 seemed fine.
Cron: Edit root's crontab (crontab -e) and stop atrun running every 5 mins, to save power
hdparm: use the -S switch to enable hard-drive spindown
The Hinote at one time was the cutting edge, selling for $3K, it's TFT screen is sharp, and fast, though the viewing angle is rather narrower than some on the market today.
The screen, while not really visible in direct sunlight is fine in anything less, and the backlight adjusts low enough to be usable in unlighted places, without eyestrain.
This machine is perfectly capable of running both lose95, and X, without too much resource starvation, of course, the 24Mb in this machine helps.
The keyboard on mine is excellent, positive feel, while not too clicky, the only flaw is a slightly dodgy spacebar, that I may look into fixing, if it bothers me
The soundcard is acceptably quiet, and the internal speaker, while not Hi-Fi is not bad
The trackball is a little stiff, and can't be made sensitive enough in windows
The status display is reasonably clear
The colour scheme is the typical exciting notebook grey, though I don't mind that, I may paint a penguin on it, to enliven it, and reduce stealability, and I will probably also add a proximity alarm, that alerts me if it goes away from me, while I'm not there.
Guard dogs, minefields, SAM batteries and tactical nuclear weapons are also under consideration though.
Things I'd like, contact me if you have any of these for sale.
The media base, 2* or 4*, Dead batteries, to pull apart, and see if I can add new cells
Larger hard drive (than 500Mb) I may not need this for a while, as I can ship stuff off to my desktop, and I am hopefully going to have a wireless LAN card up and running, so I can use the desktop's disk.