Linux on a laptop

A bit of history: my last Linux laptop was an emachines 5312. I liked it a lot. It was easy to work on, fast, had a nice screen, etc. My wife had one too, but she runs XP Home as shipped from emachines. Well... ran.

My 5312 machine was Fedora Core 4 for most of its life, and because the wireless card was a Broadcom, I had to use the slightly controversial ndiswrapper to run it from Linux. Using tools like Ksensors, I liked to watch what the CPU Mhz did in relation to various tasks I was doing, and to note when the cooling fan would come on. Partly this was because early on with Fedora Core 3 on the 5312 the fan never turned off and it ran hot. Hotter than MacBook Pro hot even. A new kernel came out at some point for FC3 with an ACPI / broken BIOS / PowerNow fix and that solved it. All was cool and quiet. FC4 never had the problem at all. I also noted my wifes fan ran far more often than mine once I had the new improved kernel. My theory there was that XP Home with the Powernow patch from emachines was still not as good at AMD Powernow management as the 2.6 kernel past a certain point is, but I really did no benchmarking or other side by side testing to verify that.

Our son also had an emachines 5310 at school. Best Buy loved us that year. My bank did not so much. And now you know why my newly repaired car is 25 years old.

My wifes 5312 essentially burned itself up. The CPU ran more and more often, and despite cleanings and replacement of the thermal paste with Arctic Silver, it one day gave up the ghost. As I had an iBook to fall back on, I took out my hard drive, and gave my 5312 to her. My son then shortly thereafter dropped his 5310, sent me the crunchy laptop bits, and I made a frankenlaptop out of her old crispy one and his old crunched one plus a few parts from eBay. Linux rode again. We built him an iBook out of parts off eBay. Again her fan ran more often than mine, even though it was really my old fan.

Then she burned up that one, and I gave her the Frankenlaptop. My Linux hard drive was homeless again. I built another junker, this time out of spare parts of an IBM X30, and put in the FC4 hard drive I had built on the emachines, which finally gets me to the point of this column.

It booted.

I should note here that I also had an XP home partition on that Harddrive, containing the XP that had shipped with the emachines. That would not boot.

I had to “teach” FC4 about the new 1024x768 screen (a quick and easy excursion into /etc/X11/xorg.conf with vi), and I had to go into “neat” to delete and redefine the NIC since I was not using the built in Broadcom anymore, but a PCMCIA Netgear MA401. Linux had native drivers for the MA401, so no problem. Total migration to new system time was about 3 minutes, not counting installing the hard drive or building the new Frankencomputer. Later, I upgraded FC4 to FC5 on this computer, again with no issues, other than it was kinda of slow.

Meantime, my wife burned up the emachines Frankenmachine, and we gave up and replaced that with a on-sale-at-the-geek-store Toshiba M45 laptop. The M45 has thermaled off about 4 times but so far not burned up. She occasionally does work rendering pictures in Adobe. She hurts laptops.

Time passes: 6 months later I decided to take advantage of a sale at geek paradise and picked up an inexpensive “decontented” Compaq V5101. It's missing PCMCIA slots, firewire, and third USB connector relative to the “contented” one, but I can live without all that. I bought it without doing any research into Linux compatibility or anything. I just assumed it would work. The FrankenX30 still works for that matter, it is just it has lower resolution screen and is generally older and slower, and this V5101 was really inexpensive. Not One Laptop Per Child inexpensive, but still pretty amazingly low cost.

The hard drive popped out of the X30, into the V5101.

It booted.

It noted the screen was wrong (back to 1280x800), and asked me if it should fix it. I said “sure”, and I was up. Some new FC5 coolness it would appear. No vi trips to /etc/X11/xorg.conf required. The XP partition still laughed at me when I tried it. I get that a lot from XP.

The wireless would not work out of the can: another Broadcom 802.11g, but apparently different enough from the one in the emachines that the now year-plus backlevel version of ndiswrapper would not load it. Using the Ethernet, I grabbed a new copy of ndiswrapper, ran the usual make / make install incantations, picked up a fresh MS Windows driver from the ndiswrapper web site and installed it with the freshly minted ndiswrapper command, and all was well again. Total time to migrate about 30 minutes, including the time it took to switch the hard drive. It is easy to switch harddrives on the V5101!.

And XP still won't boot. I know, I know: I have to reinstall it because it has all the emachines drivers and everything. The v5101 restore utility looks like it wants to whack the whole hard drive though, so I am proceeding with caution. So far, that means not proceeding till I can find out if the restore will just do the XP partition.

You can make the case that a new-to-Linux person would not know how to get ndiswrapper going so quickly, or even that I got really lucky buying hardware without research and having it work. In any case, from my point of view, it sure is easy to get Linux laptops going these days.

These Linux laptops run cool! After the MacBook I had forgotten what a cool laptop felt like. I think I'll go install OpenSUSE 10.1 on the HP NX5000 and start getting it ready for SHARE. I'll bet right now there will be no problems. That is an easy bet though: HP shipped that one to me with Linux on it....

One last note: my friend and co-presenter in the past at LinuxWorld bought an emachines 5312 at the same time I did way back when, has run Linux this whole time, and not burned it up even once, even while running virtual machines for the LinuxWorld lab we gave. He doesn't hurt laptops.