An Apology

Having been suitably admonished by the powers that be, I would like to offer my apologies to those I offended with my intemperate words on my prior posting in this subforum, particularly to Baserk, whom I should not have referred to in the manner I did. As the old saying goes, marry (or, in this case, post) in haste, repent at leisure.

Notwithstanding my (perhaps intemperate) frustrations, I am still interested in trying my hand at getting a linux version up and running, if not on the laptop in question, on another suitable piece of hardware I've got somewheres. (Sorry, I still cannot stomach the silly names, so I trust that the wise ones here will be able to interpret my use of standard "square" terminology ).

Mea culpa, pacis ut totis,

Shyster1

 

Classy post, Shyster. Public apologies are difficult; you've done it very well.

 

Nice,

Gotta get you to write one of my English essays sometime.

 

Wow, I must admit that this apology pretty clearly conveys how you actually feel. Nicely done, sir.

+Respect.

 

Group hug

 

Apologies accepted, and also extended back I'd suggest you might consider looking at vmware and some virtual machines to start figuring out Linux itself, and then worry about the hardware support. Starting at a working point is a lot easier.

 

Shyster1, I could help out in getting your laptop working fully with linux if you like, what im saying is I have some suggestions if your willing to go for it


EDIT: just saw your comment on that essay idea....I can now see it through your writing that you are a lawyer, am considering undertaking that path in uni but still have some doubts

 

Help would be very much appreciated; perhaps you could send me a pm letting me know what sort of details you need. As for lawyering - doubts are always a good thing. I always wished I'd taken a staff position at a firm first to get an idea about what it was really like (in which case, I'd probably be finishing up on a math PhD right about now ).

That being said, there's far worse (tho' perhaps more honorable) things I could be stuck doing.

 

Ive got to finish up on some work right now, but tomorrow I will fire off a pm, along with some law related questions which you may be able to answer, provided that you wish to do so without any feelings of obligation.

As for now a good starting place would be to us know which distro's you have tried and what exactly were some of the problems encountered.

 

It was nice of you to apologise but I think what was wrong with your original topic about hating linux was how you phrased it. I still support your view though.

I encountered a problem in xubuntu on my 4 year old laptop that was perfectly capable of running it. I ran 2 distros which had the same problem - the live cd would stall before it got to the desktop. I posted on this forum and on the official ubuntu forums - in 2 seperate sub forums as well - to which i got no response from the latter and the help I got here was to try another distro. After 2 of the widely considered best distros failed ( xubuntu and PCLOS) I gave up.

Basically, Im not trying to start you off again. Im merely saying I too have felt your frustration and completely empathise with your point of view.

 

That would great, thank you for the offer. I'll take the best shot I can at your law questions, keeping in mind that I can sometimes be both obtuse and verbose. In the meantime, I'll go through my notes and put together a history. Also, I seem to have got OpenSuSe 10.3 mostly working on the Compaq (except for the wireless adapter, which I really don't need and have simply decided to abandon as a lost cause for now based on what I've read online ). Right now, the biggest problems I see (which doesn't mean there aren't a lot more I don't see) are that it seems to be running very hot, although the fan does eventually come on, and the ethernet card autoconfig seems a bit weird (IPs I don't recognize), although it works.

 

About the heat issue on your laptop - how about them coolers? Proven to be quite effective .

 

That's a good suggestion. I've also thought about cracking it open and hardwiring the fan (or better yet, adding an additional fan) so that there's constant air movement through it - being basically lazy, however, I would prefer to take a stab at seeing if I can get the existing thermal controls working first.

My underlying concern is that, ultimately, the system will end up being used as a server, which means it's likely to be tucked away out of sight and left on almost permanently, so any thermal problems may not be noticed until/unless it fries itself and shuts down.

 

what wireless card do you have

and for the heat issues have you tried this handy little app

powertop

http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/ (other good info on this site as well)

a must for any one doing a laptop + linux combo

less power = less heat

 

The wireless card is a Linksys pcmcia adapter (I don't have the model# with me at the moment).

Thanks for the link to the app; I'll d/l it and give it a try when I get home tonight.

 

Well heck, if that's all you wanna do... boot it up with the kernel options of /NOACPI and /NOAPIC, and the fan will be on full speed all the time. It's what I do with my Compaq server/laptop. You don't even need to worry about an X server or anything on it... I don't even have one installed

 

Thanks. I'll give that a try as well.