This week, I finally bought a laptop, an IBM Thinkpad 390e.
Specs:
- Pentium II – 333MHz
- 128 MB SDRAM
- 6.4 GB hard drive
- Neomagic video chipset
- 14.1″ LCD screen
- Built-in 56k modem (Winmodem
) - Included Xircom 10/100 PCCard NIC
All this for only $350. I knew I would be able to install Linux on it, it was just a matter of how completely. Once again, Mandrake comes through. 8.0 installed flawlessly except for the modem. It even detected the modem; they just didn’t include drivers for it. A quick download from a link from www.linmodems.org solved that problem. The only other things I have done to it are changing the sound system from ALSA (which I despise with a passion) to OSS and to update GAIM from the 0.11pre1 version included with 8.0 to the newest version, 0.59.1. Neither sound driver works terribly well (especially for MP3 playback, but well enough for alert sounds and audio CD’s. Besides, this is a laptop, and I don’t want to kill the battery playing MP3′s or DVD’s (if that were available on this laptop).