Linux on $299 eMachines Laptop

I couldn't resist the Best Buy sale on the Acer/eMachines D620 notebook last month. It's a 1.6 GHZ, 1GIG RAM 160 GB Hard drive 14 inch laptop that come pre-installed with Vista Home basic. So once I got used to testing out the machine with Vista and coming to like the unit, it was time to put Linux on it.

I choose Xubuntu this time over SuSe, since the software package installer seems to run faster than the Suse installer did on my other Sony notebook. It's slightly light weight in that it uses XFCE instead of KDE or Gnome. So all installed well except I had a extra work to get the wireless running.

I had to seek out the Windows drivers and use what is called NDIS Wrapper, which magically allows the WIndows drivers to work in Linux. The little blinking LED for WiFi data isn't working, but the rest of the laptop is fine.

So here I am at my local Starbucks, using the D620, under Linux, connected to the ATT WiFi. All is well today in Rowland Tech Camp.

Goodbye Windows-XP, Hello openSUSE Linux

Well today is the last day for Windows-XP as Microsoft is trying again to stop the XP train and jump on the Vista train wreck. While MS will still offer a slim version of XP for those mini-notebooks, this old Sony mini-notebook user is switching to Linux.

Last weekend I wiped off WIndows-XP from my Sony Vaio PCG-SRX87 850 MHZ Pentium notebook and installed the openSUSE 10.3 Linux distribution. It still takes a geek to load it up from scratch, but if a computer came already pre-installed with Linux, I'd say it would be a great alternative to sticking with XP. Certainly my lowly Sony couldn't run VIsta, but hey, with Linux, it's another whole generation of use.

I've always liked and used Linux for my servers, but the desktop was always short of what I could get with Mac OS-X or XP. The lack of support for some of the weird peripherals in notebooks made it a challenge even for the best of us geeks. So I was amazed at the advancement that Linux offers today on the desktop front.

openSUSE with all its great support from software developers and corporate vendors is beginning to be a rather worthy contender for my notebook. The problem areas in notebooks are usually the LCD video display, the sound chips, power management, modems and wifi interfaces. I was very happily impressed that openSUSE (and I'm sure other distros for that matter) recognized the video display and was able to use it in it's native mode. It recognized and ran with the outboard firewire DVD/CD drive, worked with the ethernet and sound interfaces and most of all the internal WiFi device.

Even things like hibernate, battery monitoring and automatic HotSpot connecting worked. However not everything works, I can't get the hot keys to work for setting the screen brightness or volume, but there are options within the OS itself to set those.

So now with the newest Firefox 3 officially coming out tomorrow, I'm going to live in a Linux notebook for the time being. I still use a Mac with OS-X as my desktop web development system and still have a Mac G4 notebook, but for the coffee shop circuit, the little Sony with Linux goes a long way towards making up for the loss of MS XP.

It works great for web browsing, e-mail, podcast listening and maintaining a web blog like this one.

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