Constant in opal.

[reddragdiva]

I've installed Debian testing on my Thinkpad 560X. Spent a few days beating it around, filing a bug, installing packages piecemeal and cursing its Unixlike nature — insofar as it's as luxurious as a bare-metal Land Rover and the only comfort is what you bolt on by hand, probably including seats and suspension.

However, it is L*n*x and so can run the network card and probably the sound system. And Debian does seem at least semicoherent. I am posting from it right now, and my goodness Firefox looks odd with twm. I must investigate WiFi drivers. x11vnc is also very tempting.

(Question: I set it up with a FAT32 partition first and ext3 second. Can I use parted to merge the FAT32 space into the ext3 partition without fucking it up? Also, is there a package of laptop goodies, such as power management?)

Update: And in further happy news, my laptop's battery now appears to hold a charge! I'll be doing some reliability tests, of course ...

Comments

[reddragdiva]

I was actually hoping to whack Fedora onto it (we do plan to sell the surplus laptops, and I see no reason not to send them out into the world crawling Fedora rather than bare), except I couldn't figure out how to install the fucker without a bootable CD drive.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

I've got a base station for mine, so I didn't run into that problem, but hrm -- you've got a USB CD drive, or none?

[reddragdiva]

This one has a base station, but I think said base hasn't a CD-ROM drive. The CD-ROM drive we have is PCMCIA. This is easy with boot floppies but less so when there's no such creature. In any case, there's still no CD boot option in the BIOS. Unless there's other boot floppies I can use to boot-manage the PC-card CD-ROM.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

Hrm, there's a boot floppy for FC1. Install that and upgrade from there, maybe?

The 2.6 kernel is too big for a floppy. :-(