Where can I buy a linux-friendly laptop?

[William Park]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 09:42:03PM -0500, William Park wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 08:56:43PM -0500, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> > 
> > I just purchased an $800 Acer laptop at Canada Computes. It has *no*
> > serial or parallel ports, but it does have 4 USB ports. I know you can
> > get usb-serial adaptors and I assume that the same sort of thing
> > exists for parallel ports. The serial port adaptor includes software
> > drivers for Windows, and in Linux the drivers are built into the
> > kernel. They make the USB port invisible and software thinks it's
> > writing to a serial port which is nice, because legacy software
> > continues to work and USB is a programming nightmare.
> 
> I have my eye on that laptop, also.


Hi Peter,

A.  Can you tell me if your laptop can boot from USB key?  You should see
    something like 
	USB-FLD
	USB-HDD
	USB-ZIP
    in BIOS's boot device section.


B.  Also, just because BIOS says so, it doesn't mean it can.  I would
    appreciate if you could do a short experiment in USB booting.  

    1.  Insert a blank USB key.

    2.  Run
	    fdisk /dev/sda
	and make the whole thing a one partition (ie. /dev/sda1).

    3.  Make FAT32 filesystem, copy kernel and syslinux.cfg, and make it
	bootable.

	    mkdosfs /dev/sda1
	    mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

	    cat /boot/vmlinuz > /mnt/vmlinuz
	    cat > /mnt/syslinux.cfg << EOF
		prompt 1
		timeout 100
		label linux
		    kernel vmlinuz
		    append ro root=/dev/sda1 vga=773
	    EOF

	    umount /mnt
	    syslinux /dev/sda1

    Now, reboot your laptop.  You should see 'boot:' prompt, and then
    kernel should load.  Eventually, it will hang, because nothing is on
    /dev/sda1.  But, at least, you know it can load kernel from USB key.

-- 
William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>, Toronto, Canada
ThinFlash: Linux thin-client on USB key (flash) drive
	   http://home.eol.ca/~parkw/thinflash.html
BashDiff: Super Bash shell
	  http://freshmeat.net/projects/bashdiff/
--
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