FreeDOS/Ubuntu on HP laptops?

[Magnus Therning]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 10:26:41AM +0200, roach wrote:
>On Thursday 20 October 2005 04:24, Bret Busby wrote:
>> Oh.
>>
>> Sorry - after all of that, if the computer itself is no longer
>> available, my advice was not worth much at all.
>
>Your advice was and is worth a lot more than you think. Other people will come 
>along later and find you solution. The nx5000 has been discontinued locally, 
>but is still available elsewhere.
>
>> Perhaps, what might be worth you doing, is what we did when we bought
>> our first laptop (an unreplaceable beauty - an Acer 1711, with a 17"
>> (NOT widescreen) screen and a P4 CPU) - take a live CD (I used Knoppix
>> at the time, now we also have Gnoppix - the GNOME based one, and, Ubuntu
>> 5.04 has one), and boot up a prospective laptop with that, to check for
>> hardware compatibility. Find a laptop that you like the specs and
>> appearance of, and try it with a live CD, to find whether it is
>> compatible.
>
>There's not a lot of local laptop dealers here and they don't allow you
>to play with their merchandise. Again, that's good idea though.

Just out of curiousity, is there some live CD that's especially good at
this? I'd love to bring a CD to a store, pop it into a lap- or desktop,
reboot and have a big green screen come up telling me that all present
hardware has been recognised and is supported under Linux.

AFAIK the Ubuntu live CD is a good start, but some things it can't
handle. E.g. if is there's a built-in modem (for unfortunate people like
me who lives in an area where BT hasn't put the proper cables in the
ground yet) then Ubuntu Live CD will be able to tell me what is there
(what codec it is) but it won't tell me if slmodem can handle it or not.

It'd be even greater if it could tell me things like "the built-in WIFI
is only supported using ndiswrapper", or "the graphics card will only do
HW-accelerated OpenGL using a proprietary, closed-source kernel module",
or "the manufacturer of the WIFI chip is anti-opensource".

It'd be even better if the Livd CD would use sound (given that it can
configure it) to announce to the entire store that "this crappy laptop,
that they charge almost £1000 for, only can be used with proprietary SW,
meaning you'll have to spend even more money!"...

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org
http://therning.org/magnus

Software is not manufactured, it is something you write and publish.
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by patent law on written works.

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