I would like to buy a used-but-good midcapability laptop, known-Linux-compatable .
One of you may be thinking about upgrading to a newer/faster/ smaller Linux laptop, while already having a perfectly usable older machine that works well with Linux. My wife makes frequent trips back east to visit her family, and is getting tired of hauling her IBM Thinkpad T30 all the way there and back. Best to leave something there. On my last trip east, I took her father's broken emachines windows laptop (the BIOS was deranged and would no longer access the disk properly) and put Linux on it. That got it working (though it took about 30 seconds to load the MBR). Linux is a great way to work around some bad BIOS problems, and squeeze more performance out of old hardware. Then my brother-in-law, a "Windows expert", broke it again trying to restore Windows - without reading instructions, notes (I spent most of a day determining Windows would not run properly), or taking out the carefully optimized Linux drive and putting in the smaller drive that Windows was on. But then, I already said he was a Windows expert, implying a special way of "thinking". Grrrr... So, no more "family" machine; she gets her own laptop back east, and we lock it up when she isn't there. She doesn't need much when she is remote - documents in Open Office, web surfing, printing, and a lot of xterm stuff. VPN access for email and backups. I can set all that up, if the machine is capable. I figure a 1GHz+ 512MB+ 1024x768+ decent-sized screen laptop with a couple of PCMCIA slots will do it. USB2 preferred, USB1 acceptable. Built in ethernet would be nice, though I can use a PCMCIA slot for an ethernet card. At least half an hour of battery life. A DVDreader CDwriter drive is a plus, but we can get a USB one or just use thumb drives. Built in Wifi a slight minus, I prefer PCMCIA wireless, but I can pull the internal card. In other words, a 2002-2005 era high-quality laptop. A slight preference for IBM T series or something with a trackpoint, but she can use a mouse. What I don't want is driver hassles, poor quality, or other headaches. No lemons. A known good machine running Linux well, being replaced for upgrade reasons. After I see the laptop demonstrated, I will even let the original owner keep the hard drive, we will add our own. Contact me off the list with the make, model, and type number, and what distro it is running now. We can dicker from there. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
