Having three notebook computers has its own problems. My main notebook at the moment is the Macbook that I purchased nearly 11 months ago. It has been a solid companion of mine in doing teaching work and general everyday computing. Then I have my old Dell Inspiron 8600 which functions similarly to an everyday desktop computer. It is also the machine on which I play games such as Colin McRae and Medal of Honor (not the latest ones, of course).

My third notebook is the first portable machine that I bought around 4 years ago which died at the end of 2006 and then was resurrected about 12 months ago, thanks to some kind soul who sold me a brand new replacement motherboard on Ebay. By the way, the cost of the motherboard was around one fifth what Toshiba quoted for replacing it. After spending three hours pulling the machine apart with photographic evidence so I can retrace my steps and then putting it back together slowly over three days (we all have to go to work, huh?), I ended up with an almost brand new notebook (except for a few creaky plastic panels and a spare screw).

While on Ebay I also purchased some accessories for my old Toshiba, including a second battery for the multi-bay, a dock, an intel wifi mini-pci card (ipw2100) and a higher capacity main battery. Considering the notebook was quite old by then, everything was reasonably cheap. I got everything for under $200 and got a second charger thrown in with the dock (thanks, buddy!).

What the whole process created for me was not just a notebook but also a project to get my dream Linux notebook. Ever since I stopped having a desktop machine in 2004, I have always wanted to have a notebook that can run Linux properly or rather to have a Linux OS that can run a notebook properly. While it was not entirely impossible, it was difficult.

Most distros at that time seemed to be focused on the desktop machine. I vividly remember installing Mandrake 10 on a notebook only to discover that by default the PCMCIA module was always disabled. This was not to mention things such as wifi cards, etc. Did I mention that when you plug an external drive into the machine you have to manually mount it?

After the sore disappointment with Mandrake (which was great as the basis of my server) I discovered Knoppix. It was truly eye-opening to discover an OS (live CD as well) that would automatically recognise the many important pieces of hardware that a notebook has, including wifi and the PCMCIA slots as well as beautifully auto-mounting any drive that I plugged in.

For a while I was running a Poor Man’s Install of Knoppix, which was basically a live cd that was stored on the Hard Drive as a bootable iso image. While it was great for doing things online and for experimental hacking, it did not allow much in the way of software installation. So if you’re missing a kernel module or you want to try a driver for some new piece of hardware, then too bad.

To be continued

Read part 2 of this article

Linux · open source · os · ubuntu