From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Aug 2 16:57:36 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from alcor.concordia.ca (alcor.Concordia.CA [132.205.7.51]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3BF0237BE9D for ; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:57:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dwharton@alcor.concordia.ca) Received: from localhost (dwharton@localhost) by alcor.concordia.ca (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA20367; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 19:57:20 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 19:57:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Dale Wharton To: Jon Hamilton Cc: Greg Lehey , FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: cheapest laptop for FreeBSD? winmodems? In-Reply-To: <20000802041505.417C71D@woodstock.monkey.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Jon, many thanks for your very constructive remarks. Your aside about winmodems rang my bell (internet access is essential for my purpose). Which raises another question: how does one learn in advance if a modem is a winmodem? The only literature that I saw, a brief spec sheet on the Compaq Presario 1200-XL115, says simply "Modem 56kbps with V.90 Support." Regards ... -- _ Dale Wharton ve2ndw@rac.ca M O N T R E A L Te souviens-tu? On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Jon Hamilton wrote: > Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 23:15:05 -0500 > From: Jon Hamilton > > [...] > > I have one of those (Compaq 1200-XL) and while I agree that their reputation > isn't the best as far as hardware compatibility goes, I will say that getting > FreeBSD running on it wasn't hard at all. The built in modem is a winmodem, > so that's useless, but aside from that everything appears to work fine -- I > don't have any USB stuff, but the controller is detected at boot and I assume > that would work if the need arose. The builtin sound did require a patch; > it doesn't work out of the box yet. See www.inode.org/sw/auvia/ if you > buy one of these and want to use sound. > > Having said all of that, I use mine as a dual boot machine with W98, mainly > so my son can watch DVDs while traveling in the car :) Getting a "regular" > W98 installed on it was a horse of a completely different color. I don't > use Windows much, nor do I know much about it, so my progress was probably > slower than would have been the case for someone used to Windows, but even > so it took me 4 solid days to hunt down all the drivers and weirdo custom > pieces I needed to run a non-Compaq supplied copy of W98. Also, beware that > they ship with a rescue disk which is a pathetic joke -- they partition > the disk into two volumes, and the rescue disk depends upon the stuff they > had on the D: drive being there in order to be of any use! > > The screen on the compaq is noticibly better (crisper, brighter, and in most > cases, larger) than the other laptops in the same price range at the time I > was shopping, which was really the main reason I opted to buy it. > > So in summary, it's pretty good as a FreeBSD-only machine, a bit of a pain > if you want to dual boot. Take that for whatever it's worth :) > > -- > Jon Hamilton > hamilton@pobox.com > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message