poor man
 

Hi i belong to the people which are born poor and are dye poor.
I am thinking af bying a second-hand laptop.
We are talking for PII technoloy with maximum 128mb RAM and some giga of hard disk space.....also some pcmcia cards are available.
Because nobody can spent all his money. I want to know if the laptop is supported by Linux. Also i need to bye an ethernet card and i wish i knew if the ethernet card is supported by my pcmcia and if it is supported by my Linux os.
Any suggestions,thoughts,resources and links can help me a lot.
Have nice day :)

I am not too economically blessed either, so you're not alone. :)
Luckily I have had the opportunity to buy used laptops from my former employers so I have had second hand laptops for years, and they usually work well. The fine thing about Linux on older hardware is that pretty much everything is supported, even if you may have to Google some and read up on Linux on Laptops in order to get everything working.

My former laptop was a Dell Latitude CPi A300XT (300MHz, 128MB RAM, 6GB HD, neomagic video chip) which worked exceptionally well untill I dropped it on the ground for the second time.

My current laptop is an IBM Thinkpad 600E, a 366MHz model with 192MB RAM and it works very well. I have upgraded the HD to 40GB and in an instant it became quite a quiet and responsive machine.

The network card I use now is a D-Link DFE-670TXD. It is a 16bit (not 32bit/cardbus) card which is very well supported on all distributions since it uses the standard pcnet_cs driver in the Linux kernel. It is a 10/100mbit autosensing card but since it is a 16bit card it doesn't provide full 100mbit throughput, more like 10mbit. But it is affordable, reliable and works well.

I hope that gets you started.


Håkan

axa
 

thx.....which 32bit cards are supported by Linux?

You can check what cards are supported by the PCMCIA-CS project, and also check the kernel hardware compatibility list. Many cards are supported both by the kernel and the PCMCIA-CS project. You need PCMCIA-CS even if you use the kernel drivers because the card control programs come from the project. As far as I know, PCMCIA-CS is included in all distributions but perhaps not all of the drivers.


Håkan