[rescue] laptop suggestions

Steve Sandau ssandau at gwi.net
Sat Aug 25 12:27:19 CDT 2007


> I recently was given a laptop (Compaq Armada (appropriate name...) 
> P2/266, 13GB disk, S3 ViRGE/MX graphics), and I thought I'd try to put 
> something interesting on it. I've been hampered by the fact that 
> neither BeOS nor OPENSTEP have ViRGE/MX drivers. I'm probably going to 
> use it for school, so it needs to have basic productivity applications.
> 
> It's looking more and more like it might be some species of BSD, but I 
> thought I'd ask if anyone else had ideas.

I have put OpenBSD on a coule of older laptops lately, and have been 
really impressed by the overall usability of them. They've been low 
memory (256 or less) machines, and XFCE has performed well, and wireless 
networking has been quite easy. Beyond packages, the ports collection 
seems to have all kinds of things available.

I am now using Linux on my current laptop (T23, 1GHz, 512M) because I 
can use flash, VMWare and a few other things without recompiling, and I 
refuse to run windows.

Overal, I think OpenBSD and XFCE is a good choice for slower machines, 
laptop or desktop.

Steve



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