Re: Some experience of linux on a Laptop

[Julien Laganier <Julien.Laganier@Sun.COM>]

John Nilsson wrote:
> 
> Well I thought that it was time for me to give some feedback to the linux
> community. So I will tell you guys a little of my experience with linux so
> far.
> 
> I have a Toshiba Portégé 3010CT laptop. That is:
> 266MHz Pentium-MMX
> 4GB HD with 512kb cache (which linux reduces to 0kb)
> 32 Mb EDO RAM
> 
> After have tried
> Slackware
> Gentoo
> Linux From Scratch
> Debian
> Mandrake
> and soon ROCK linux
> 
> I have come to the conclusion that linux is NOT suitable for the general
> desktop market, I have configured a number of linux routers/fierwalls and am
> really pleased with the scalability, but the harware compatibility is to
> damn low for a general user base. I know this isn't really a Linux issue
> rather a distribution issue, but in the end it's you guys that make the
> drivers. So a little plea is that you let the optimization phase cooldown a
> little and concern your self a little more with compatibility, and ease of
> installation, (tidy up the kernel build system).
> 
> On my particular computer the chipset (toshiba specific) is not supported
> wich makes the harddrive unable to run in UDMA and/or use it's cache.
> Somehow this make X totaly unusable. With a little luck if it doesn't hang
> it takes several minutes to launch a simple program.
> This could be X specific, but I doub't it.
> 
> So when you speak of being able to run on 386:es I still have problem
> starting X on 266MHz with 32Mb mem. This should not be =)

Take a look at http://www.linux-laptop.net
It's quite useful :-)