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Processor | Cyrix 5x86 100 MHz |
RAM on-board | 8 MB |
RAM extension | 4, 8 or 16 MB (only one slot available) |
Screen | 10.4 in. DSTN color LCD |
Display resolution | 640 × 480 × 256 colors (1024 × 768 on external monitor) |
Video RAM | 1 MB |
HDD | 540 MB (upgradeable) |
Floppy | standard 3.5 in. 1.44 MB (builtin) |
PCMCIA | two Type-II cards or one Type-III |
Trackball | two buttons |
Interfaces | serial, parallel, VGA, PS/2 |
Power | NiMH accumulator, 9.6 V, 2800 mAh |
Suspend modes | suspend to RAM, suspend to disk |
Size | 287 × 227 × 52 mm |
Weight | approx. 2.8 kg / 6.1 lb (with accumulator) |
As you can see, the processor power (a fast 486) is quite acceptable for most simple applications (such as word processing or web surfing), but memory is quite tight.
The size is quite acceptable, even modern systems are not much smaller (only thinner). The laptop is quite heavy, however; almost 3 kg (over 6 lb for our non-metric friends) is a lot if you have to carry it for more than a few minutes. Still the laptop will fit nicely into a backpack or anything bigger than a handbag, and is useful when traveling.
Battery life, unfortunately, is not so good. On my (rather used) laptop, I get about 70-90 minutes maximum, which is not so great for a 4-hour train ride. The manual claims about two hours running time, but I could never check that with a new accumulator (I bought the system used). Still, you definitely want to take along the power brick (which is not big) and use it whenever possible. The ability to suspend to RAM (or better: to disk) somewhat mitigates this; you can suspend and resume in about 20 seconds, so you can save power whenever you don't use the system for a few minutes.
The display is not perfect, either. It is a DSTN (not a modern TFT) LCD display. This means it reacts slowly (blurs fast movements), so it is not suitable for e.g. fast moving games (event though the processor is quite powerful enough for e.g. DOOM). More importantly, the display also copes badly with bright light. Indoors, without direct sunshine, it is fine, but outdoors, unless on a very cloudy day, it is difficult to impossible to see anything on it due to poor contrast.
The accumulator can be exchanged easily (even while in suspend to disk), but it is (of course) proprietary, quite expensive (? approx. $100?) and may no longer be available. Inside, it seems to use ordinary NiMh cells. You could try to crack the pack open and exchange the cells to repair it, but that is mechanically quite tricky (plus may or may not mess up the integrated electronics). I have not done that.
First of all, you need to choose a Linux distribution the requirements of which the laptop can satisfy, as it only has 540 MB of drive space and 8 - 24 MB RAM. There also is no CD-ROM drive, so the distro will need to support alternative ways of installation (most do). I use Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (potato), which works fine. For the rest of these instructions, I will assume you use Debian; other distributions should work similarly, adjust accordingly.
Before installing, you should set up the disk for suspend to disk. This needs a special partition. It can be created using a small utility called phdisk.exe which comes with the laptop. Just make a MS-DOS boot floppy, put phdisk.exe on it, boot it and run phdisk.exe . This will erase the hard disk, so it should be done first. If you don't have phdisk.exe, you may be able to find it on the web site of NEC or of Phoenix (the BIOS' manufacturer), or mail me and I'll send it to you. Alternatively, there is a Linux replacement for phdisk.exe called lphdisk by Patrick D. Ashmore. It is available at http://www.procyon.com/~pda/lphdisk/. I have never used it myself, though.
Now for the actual installation: First, boot the laptop with the Linux installation floppy
(enable floppy booting in the BIOS first), then partition the hard drive according to your
needs (and make a swap partition). The suspend-to-disk partition will appear as
type a0
, "IBM Thinkpad Hibernation". Do not touch it.
As there is no CD-ROM drive on the laptop, you will need a different means of installation. The easiest is via a network. The physical connection can be made using a PCMCIA ethernet card (easiest, fastest, if you have a PCMCIA ethernet card), via parallel port (PLIP) networking (slow) or via serial port (even slower). The ethernet option is best, if you have the hardware. Otherwise, you can use parallel line IP (PLIP, see the PLIP Mini HOWTO from the Linux Documentation Project) or serial line IP (SLIP) via a 'nullmodem cable'. These options are significantly slower, but require no special hardware except from the cable. Once the hardware is in place, follow your distribution's instructions for installing via network.
The basic installation should work without problems. Here are a few technical details you might need:
Finally, make sure you don't install more than the hard disk will hold. It is not very big...
floppy
kernel module. Therefore, I use the APM daemon apmd
to unmount the floppy
and remove the module on suspend. On Debian, to do this you just put the appropriate commands
umount /floppy; rmmod floppy
into a script in /etc/apm/suspend.d
.
cat /dev/psaux
on the console (as root) and
moving the trackball a bit after X is started. No idea why this helps.
apm
command from the apm package to see how much battery
power is left; don't trust the percentage too much though; the decrease is highly non-linear.
The power saving can be customized in the BIOS dialog; I set mine to switch off the screen
when closing the lid and to suspend on keypress (Fn-Escape). Also don't forget to enable
suspend-to-disk in the BIOS, otherwise suspend-to-RAM will be used.To read a text on the laptop, do the following: get your text from Project Gutenberg and run it through my script:
gutb2latex <input.txt >output.tex
This will do basic formatting; you should now mark up the chapter headings in
output.tex
like this:
...blablabla...
\section{Introduction}
...blablabla
and insert the command \tableofcontents
where you want - guess what - to
appear.
Run the latex
command on the resulting file twice, then dvips
with
Option -o
. The resulting Postscript file, when viewed with gv
at
1.414 magnification in orientation landscape, will exactly fill the screen. You may have to
fiddle a bit to make gv
's window so big that the borders and toolbar are
invisible (use e.g. icewm's keyboard commands for that), then the text will fill the whole
screen. Enable anti-aliasing (Key a
), turn the laptop on its side and enjoy
reading.
Remark: The gutb2latex
script assumes paragraphs in the input document
are delimited by empty lines. If your input document indents the first line of a new
paragraph instead (some Gutenberg texts do that), adjust the relevant line in my script
for paragraphs to be recognized.
Here's the code of the gutb2latex
script I made:
#! /bin/bash # gubt2latex # convert a Project Gutenberg document into a LaTeX document # (with some manual assistance) if [ "$1" == "-h" -o "$1" == "--help" ]; then cat <<EOF Usage: gutb2latex >etext.txt< Convert a Project Gutenberg document into a LaTeX document (with some manual assistance). gutb2latex v1.0, Mai 2000 (C) 2000 Sebastian Leske May be used, modified and distributed freely as long as this notice is preserved. EOF exit fi # get rid of CR/LFs flip -b -u $1 # LaTeX-preamble cat <<EOF \documentclass[10pt]{article} \usepackage[margin=0.8cm,nohead,nofoot,paperwidth=14.5cm,paperheight=18.5cm]{geometry} \begin{document} EOF # treat characters with a special meaning in LaTeX # first save backslashes sed -e 's/\\/!-ssr-!/g' $1 | sed -e 's/\^/\\^/g' | sed -e 's/\$/\\$/g' | sed -e 's/&/\\&/g' | sed -e 's/%/\\%/g' | sed -e 's/~/\\~/g' | sed -e 's/_/\\_/g' | sed -e 's/#/\\#/g' | sed -e 's/}/\\}/g' | sed -e 's/{/\\{/g' | sed -e 's/!-ssr-!/\\\\/g' # Make emtpy lines for paragraphs (if necessary) # must be adjusted and uncommented if needed # Count the number of spaces used for indenting the first line of # a new paragraph, and make sure that number of spaces appears # after the '^' in the next line (then uncomment it) # perl -pe 'if ($_=~"^ [a-z,A-Z,\"]" ) {print "\n"}' <rein >raus echo '\end{document}' # Ende