[rescue] laptop suggestions

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Scott Quinn <compoobah at valleyimplants.com>
>Date: 2007/08/25 Sat AM 09:36:44 CDT
>To: rescue at sunhelp.org
>Subject: [rescue] laptop suggestions

>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.

Just a couple datapoints:

Win2K runs pretty well on laptops of that era, and it is pretty stable and affords you the chance to run lots of different 32 bit windows software

WinXP can be decent, if you have a lot of RAM - how much RAM do you have?

Solaris x86 (probably not Solaris 10) can also run pretty well, but start-up times can be agonizing (once running, Solaris feels fine on a PII/266-300 MHz laptop, with *at least* 256 Meg RAM).

PC-BSD might be an interesting choice as well, slightly less *humongous* than, say, Fedora ;^)

Just a few thoughts to kick around...

Lionel