The screen broke on my Kogan Agora (during a SLUG presentation) and it
was not feasible to repair. So I looked around for a similar unit: a low
cost laptop with a screen between 11 and 12 inches, which is suitable
for running Linux. I chose the HP Pavilion DM1-4108AU ($368). I tried
Open SuSe, Ubuntu, Mint and Puppy Linux. There are problems with the
driver for the Broadcom WiFi hardware (BCM43103) in a default Linux
installation and WiFi would only work in Puppy and then not very well.
So I settled on Mint 14 and installed a proprietary WiFi driver:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/12/installing-linux-on-hp-pavilion-dm1.html
The HP Pavilion came with only 2 Gbytes of RAM. I added an extra 4GB for
$23. The hard parts were finding the store to buy the RAM (in a park
behind Sydney TAFE) and getting the back off the computer:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2013/01/4gb-extra-ram-for-hp-pavilion-dm1-4108au.html
The HP comes with a 320 GB hard disk, which I swapped for the 64 GB
Solid State Disk (SSD). I solved the problem of the shiny black bezel
around the HP's screen, by spraying it with a can of flat black enamel
paint:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2013/01/installing-solid-state-disk-in-hp.html
Some problems remain with the HP hardware, in particular the shiny
screen is still an annoyance and I have yet to find a suitable
anti-reflective filter.
Happy to talk about it at a future Slug meeting.
--
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
--
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