War Story: HP 2000 Laptop

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 06, 2013 at 03:07:07PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> An old laptop (IBM Thinkpad T43) recently died on me, so I have been
> poking around at laptop options.  The one that finally tempted me into
> a buy was an HP 2000 2b53CA that is on sale at $339 at Costco.  That
> is a bit time sensitive; I think the sale ends tomorrow or Friday.
> 
> I'm collecting my notes here:
>  http://linuxdatabases.info/info/hpaq.html
> 
> It's pretty basic hardware:
> - 15.6" screen

Surprisingly hard to find the resolution.  HP doesn't seem to like
telling you, but apparently by high definition, HP means 1366x768.

Does bilingual mean it has the awful keyboard with the tiny shift keys
and enter key that are impossible to hit when actually typing (rather
than hunt and peck)?

> - 4GB memory, expandable to 8
> - Pentium B980
> 
> It uses UEFI by default; hitting "F10" during boot allows switching to
> "legacy" BIOS, which was suitable to let me toss in a Debian CD
> (6.0.5 netinst), which recognized enough hardware to get me on
> network.  It spent last night installing 1300-ish packages, and is
> further, today, upgrading those to testing.

Well I think wheezy at least should natively work with UEFI (at least
the 64bit version should).

> It's early to say "everything's good"; I should have better answers
> on that tomorrow, notably relating to wireless (which I haven't tried
> to play with).  But it's all looking promising.

I think the wifi is a ralink chip, so you might be in luck if your kernel
is new enough.

So for debian that might mean you need to use squeeze-backports to get
a new enough kernel (or use wheezy even though it isn't released yet).

I do like my new thinkpad W530, but it sure didn't cost only $339.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists