[Université Paris Diderot, INRIA]

Pierre Letouzey

Linux et portables

TODO: Désolé, la traduction française reste à faire

Linux on my successive laptops (and also my sister's ones).

Acer Extensa 390

[Extensa Pic 1] [Extensa Pic 2]

1998: Pentium 166, 32Mb RAM, 2Gb disk (then 4Gb), 12'' LCD screen (non-TFT), 800x600

It was working correctly under linux, except that:

  • the LCD screen was really poor: DSTN, i.e. pre-TFT time, far from bright enough (in particular, the mouse was hardly visible when moving it)
  • the sound card (Yamaha OPL3-SAx) was a nightmare at that time, working correctly only with proprietary drivers from 4Front

Nec Versa Note

[VersaNote Pic 1] [VersaNote Pic 2]

2000: Pentium Celeron 266, 64Mb RAM, 6Gb disk, 13.3'' TFT screen, 1024x768

A nice machine. I don't recall any particular problems with it during the time I used it as my main computer. Recently I re-used it a few months as X Terminal connected via XDMCP to a more modern machine. Now, for a friend, I've installed on it Damn Small Linux that is both small and quick enough (see image). I even managed to run a recent Knoppix on it, but then you'd better add a boot option like desktop=icewm. It's still terribly slow this way, but can't be worst than the default KDE.

Compaq Evo N800c

2003: Pentium IV M 1800, 750Mb RAM, ~40Gb disk, 15'' screen, 1400x1050

[Compaq Pic]

The machine on which I've written my PhD thesis... Was working great, except for ACPI and suspend modes. For quite a long time I thought that Compaq ACPI tables (DSDT) were buggy and needed to be patched at boot-time, before finding that the bug was in fact in linux kernel's ACPI code. Nonetheless, I never managed to use S3 sleep mode (suspend-to-RAM): on resume, the Radeon card was not waking up at all.

More information on K's page. Beware, the ACPI part is obsolete.

Dell Latitude D810

[D810 Pic 1] [D810 Pic 2]

2006: Pentium IV M 2.13Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 60Gb disk, 15'' wide screen, 1680x1200

A somewhat heavy but marvelous machine. Everything works great, except open source 3D that works, but unreliably. After a couple of months with this laptop, I really enjoy S3 sleep (suspend-to-RAM).

(Probably obsolete) Details on how to install debian on this Dell D810

Dell Latitude D420

TODO...

My sister's 1st laptop: Acer Aspire 1300

[Aspire Pic 1] [Aspire Pic 2]

2004: Duron 1.2 Ghz, 128Mb RAM initially (later x3), 20Gb disk, 15'' screen, 1024x768

I installed an Ubuntu Breezy Badger (5.10) on this laptop without any particular problem.

My sister's 2nd laptop: Asus M5AE

I also installed an Ubuntu Breezy Badger (5.10) on this laptop. Only difficulty: the wireless is controlled by an hardware switch that cannot be activated from within Linux: no Fn-F2, no ACPI trick. The only solution I found is to enable first the wireless from Windows XP, and then reboot directly to Linux. Normally, the blue LED indicating wireless should appear during Linux boot.