War Story: HP 2000 Laptop

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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)?

Yep, I expect I'll want to poke at xmodmap to map several of those onto
Control.

I briefly set it to "bilingual" mode; I couldn't figure out a way of getting
important characters like <, >, |, which matter rather a lot in shell.
That was a serious mistake.

>> - 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).

Hmm.  I should probably poke at that a little.  Nice to get it booting
both ways.

>> 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).

Yep, ralink sounds right.  It's presently on 2.6.something; I'll see about
switching to something modern-ish, and see how that turns out.

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

Tempting, for sure.  Supporting up to 32GB of memory is pretty
spectacular, for a laptop.  I wasn't keen on ~$900.  Mind you, my
Macbook, which cost ~$1300, once upon a time, has gotten pretty
ratty, and the W530 is wildly more powerful despite being quite a bit
cheaper.
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