|  I've tried MoviX2 with success. It loads movies even from the HP cd-writer, although MPlayer does not seem to play so smoothly in that case. It's better to use the laptop CDROM instead. Thus I can watch DivX movies without problems. Last year I finally got an Addonics ComboHardDrive, PCMCIA interface. I loaded a regular IDE disk and fired up Knoppix. It detected all partitions right, could even write to the disk. Tried to install Red Hat 9 to the external hard disk, but woulnd't accept the right drivers/modules (ide-cs vs. yenta_socket conflict) and never got to install a single package. Also tried Mandrake 9.1, succeeded in installing a minimal set of packages, but then it wouldn't boot from the Lilo disket I had prepared (Mandrake instaled an init image to load external PCMCIA disks on the disket, but then upon booting it would mistake the adaptor with a RAID one). So, now I use this laptop with Knoppix, mainly. I configured it to use a persistent home file in an ext2 partition in an external hard disk. This way I was able to install the modem's drivers and go online in a breeze. Fortunately one my ISPs has PAP, so it was very easy to set up an account and go online (another has PAP/CHAP and the CHAP part prevented me from going online). |
| Mozilla web browser is really fast, even faster than under Windoze.Anyway, most stuff works. Except USB, I don't know why won't load the cd-writer. Also, it has a light window manager (WindowMaker), so it runs fast. So, I think Knoppix is the best way to recycle this or any other laptop. I've tried it on other newer Toshiba Satellite laptops, and works alright. However, must pass 'noscsci' boot option or it won't boot (guess there's some conflict of drivers in the event of DVD/CD-RW drives). I want to ad that this is a strong laptop. | It has withstood many trips, hits, bumps, vibration, -5 º to 40º C temperatures, 90º+ condensing humidity (even when Toshiba says it shouldn't work in those conditions), unsteady electricity supply (voltage peaking 250 and dropping to 200 volts continually), bad electricity and phone-line wiring, etc. I have ripped an entire CD with the laptop on my lap while running from battery and riding in a car in streets full of holes! And the CD never jumps nor restarts if there is a sudden bump or vibration (unlike other brands of laptops). Toshiba reports that it should withstand like 5 G shocks and like 1 G vibration, what puts this laptop in the line of rugged notebooks. However, the case is plastic and the keyboard isn't water-proof, so I advise you against running it under water! In brief, I've been able to recycle this laptop with Linux. I've done (almost) everything I did with Windoze. I can deal with office stuff, play music and video, play games, go online and surf the internet, create web content, program software, etc. O, I forget, I could never have translucent menus except for KDE nor 4-6 virtual desktops except for Linux. To do: -
Connect this latop to a desktop PC via the parallel port (PLIP is present, so, shouldn't be a problem if I wanted to do it). -
Crack Wine's keyboard scheme to enable it and run Winblowz apps. -
Record sound (maybe it's a problem of design: Linux won't grant direct access to hardware, unlike W98+DirectX, so all sound-recording apps I tried failed to record any sound). -
Hang the system every half/2 hs. like Windoze did. (I include some screenshots. Knoppix showing the contents of a CD in the cd-writer and the external hard disk partitions on the desktop. Knoppix with XMMS playing a huge ogg file from CD. Knoppix gliding with lots of apps running: Gimp for editing images, Konqueror displaying files, OpenOffice dealing with text/presentations/spreadsheets, LyX creating a pdf book, Scribus for graphic design, and Xine playing a movie.) |
