If someone sells laptops w/o Windows installed

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 05:19:44PM +0300, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> These brands seem to change with the seasons. They have two things in
> common: they are mostly made in Taiwan, and they come 'bare bones' w/o
> anything excepting psu and battery. I do not know where to get these in
> Canada, here they appear on specials in the local newspapers etc almost
> every week. They are usually stuffed with hdds etc by local
> small integrators and you can up/downgrade at will. I will try to get some
> names for you next week. The quality is more than reasonable.
> 
> Whatever happened with Sony Vaios and Crusoe ? I thought those would be
> very compatible with linux ? No more ?

The Sony Vaio's are as is usually the case with Sony, very proprietary.
They have bits of hardware that has requires special coding to deal
with.  It seems to be finally possible to use a Vaio properly with
linux, but it sees to have taken a good year or two to get there.

ie:
Package: spicctrl
Description: Sony Vaio controller program to set LCD backlight brightness
 spicctrl is a small program that can use the Sony Programmable I/O Control
 device (SPIC), which is part of Sony Vaio's, to do a few simple things.
 Currently, it can only be used to control the brightness on the LCD
 backlight, and print out some information about the battery.

 You need a kernel with the sonypi module (and a Vaio laptop..) to use this
 program.

So not really that plain and simple.

No idea about the Crusoe based machines.  Supported CPU doesn't imply
supported other hardware.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml