[clug] Re: linux Digest, Vol 45, Issue 8

[Rodney Peters]

On Tuesday 05 September 2006 22:01,  adrian blake wrote:
> Has anyone had any good or bad experiences with installing and running
> Linux on any of these machines. They are at the lower end of the market.
>
> My daughter wants to purchase one and she has been brought up on Linux for
> over 10 years. She is just a user, her only experience with windoz has been
> at high school.
>
> Her main applications will be Openoffice, gimp, e-mail, browsing &
> transferring music from CDs to her mp3 player.
>
> Compaq v4407TU
> toshiba satellite M50 M00
> toshiba A100 HooNB
> ACER 1642ZWLMi
>
Depends on whether or not she is prepared to retain Windoz on the laptop.

I'm wary of Toshibas.  Don't have experience with the above models, but the 
Tecra has no keystroke combination via which the BIOS settings can be 
accessed.  Instead, you must boot to Windoz and run a Windoz GUI application 
to change the settings eg to put CDROM above HDD in the boot order.

On the few laptops I've dealt with, the NTFS partition could not be shrunk to 
less than 50% of HDD.

> viewing http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ does not give precise information
> on these models but reading between the lines suggest that they will work.
> Before purchasing I hope to run a live Linux CD such as Ubuntu on each.
>
> Any other suggestions are welcome.


Rod