For all of you who wondered if I actually did buy something....... How I bought my Acer Travelmate 512T
After seven weeks of grueling summer classes (teaching them, not taking them) I thought about treating myself to something nice: so I bought a notebook. I had been researching the subject for about 6 months already and after I helped a friend buy an Acer Travelmate 331T I found the quality good enough to buy an Acer myself too. I settled for the Travelmate 512T because I wanted an all-in-one design. It has nice speakers on the front and a very intuitive keyboard. I read up on the compatibility with Linux and it seemed not too bad bearing in mind that with Linux you always have to spend a considerable amount of time before you got a system running the way you want it. So I went to the shop and first negotiated a good price with the owner (remember, I bought it in Taiwan). I paid exactly US$1500 for the basic machine, upgraded the RAM from 32 to 96 MB for US$78, decided not to upgrade to a 6.4 GB hard drive because the machine came with a 4.6 GB hard drive - and not the 4.0 GB as advertised - and I also bought a D-Link card bus Ethernet card for US$56. When I told the owner that I wanted to revoke the MS Windows license he said almost nobody did that. But in the end he accepted the fact that I had no use for it (the machine came with traditional Chinese Windows 98) and so he gave me a refund of US$30. I then settled down at a table in the back of the shop with the machine, booted the Debian 2.1 CD-ROM and partitioned the hard disk. I installed the base system, but at reboot the PCMCIA hung the machine. As I have no experience with PCMCIA I decided to buy a D-Link Ethernet card which was on the supported card list and take it home and experiment with it later. I then changed /etc/init.d/pcmcia to /etc/init.d/x-pcmcia and the machine booted fine. To have some feel of achievement I then decided to see if I could get X working. I installed the debs necessary and ran XF86Setup. The touchpad was a simply PS/2 mouse, as server I choose the standard SVGA and as monitor something that could to 800x600 at 60Hz. The server came up only the desktop was four times too big, i.o.w. I saw the lower-left part of the desktop stretched over the entire LCD with a huge "Start" button from fvwm95. I checked the /etc/XF86Config and that file was full of "320x204" resolutions, nothing else. I changed them all to "640x480" but no luck. Funny thing was that the moment I got X running there were four guys gazing over my shoulder at the wonders I was performing. Linux is not big in Taiwan yet, but it is gaining momentum with a new Linux magazine in Chinese just launched (July 99) and Chinese versions of Linux out. They were very interested, we had a nice discussion about the merits of Linux and I showed them some things you could do from the console. I had been sitting there for more than 2 hours, so I decided that it was enough and I headed home. I may not have succeeded in much besides installing a base system, but I am a patient man and the fun thing about Linux for me is the problem solving part and the sense of achievement you get from that. Next things to do: - make a list of all the hardware specs - upgrade the kernel to 2.2.10 - get pcmcia working - get X working (NeoMagic MagicMedia256AV. I got the right driver from RedHat's ftp site - XFCom-neomagic-glibc-2_0_0-1_i386.tgz - but no luck in installing them. Still "320x204") Hans P.S. I hope to expand the above and make it into a web page one of these days.
