Finally laptop is windows free...

Just wanted to celebrate today is the day i deleted my windows partition off my laptop forever! It was a hard fight that isn't over yet but i FINALLY got APCI working so that i know my battery life (kind of important in a mobile environment!). That was the point I decided to go 100% linux (well that and after getting Neverwinter Nights to work!).

I don't know if this was appropriate but I see the rants about how linux was too hard all the time and how they're going back to Bill and figured it's alright to post a success story once in a while!

I agree! I should be in Linux right now, but, I booted the EvilOS to play a game or 2.... But I *could* choose to remove WinBlowz if I felt like it.... but My consciousness hasn't caught up with me yet... :-p


But keep up the good work! Oh, what laptop, and what Distro? Just so other might learn from u're sucess...

Started with Redhat but could never get it working "just right" I'm using mandrake 9.1 and it was wonderful because the internal wireless lan card was detected with just the normal install! I had to do some stuff to get acpi working right but it wasn't too hard. Oh my laptop is a vprmatrix 185A5. I'm still having a problem with getting dual mice to work right (touchpad and usb mouse) but on the whole it's working great. The main reason I am switching is i changed schools and in my new school it is all unix/linux based programming so i HAVE to force myself to learn it. It has been enjoyable though.

Oh and for games... i've found neverwinter nights works great! Also unreal tournament 2003 is pretty good. I really like turn base strategy games though and am looking around at what is available.

Right on Cuzzle! Feels good doesn't it?

I tell ya, when I wiped Windows completely I was a happy happy camper...but as a bonus, I started learning even more about how linux works...just from using it all the time from that point on (ie: No temptation to boot up in Windows)

hey guys,

I hope you don't mind me getting in on this thread, but i was wondering if someone could tell me what ACPI is? if it is something you can use to monitor your battery life for notebooks PLEASE let me know where i can get it. I have just recently put RH 9 on my laptop and am still having to work through some issues.

Thanks so much.

Originally posted by bshelton hey guys, I hope you don't mind me getting in on this thread, but i was wondering if someone could tell me what ACPI is? if it is something you can use to monitor your battery life for notebooks PLEASE let me know where i can get it. I have just recently put RH 9 on my laptop and am still having to work through some issues. Thanks so much.

ACPI is a battery/temp monitor. There's plans for it to take over APM's role, since APM is older, and is more of a pain in the butt. I don't know the details, exactly, but I've found ACPI to be much nicer on my laptop.

As to how to get it, there's a website, but I'm not sure how to install it from there. I just installed the package off the mandrake CD..

I could never get it to work in Red Hat but then again you have to patch your kernel etc. In mandrake 9.1 the patch is already there so all you have to do is disable APM and enable ACPI when you install it! Easy as that! The page for the project is:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/acpi/

There is some documentation here:

http://acpi.sourceforge.net/

probably do a search for your particular distro on how to install it. Though right now i would just recommend you install Mandrake 9.1!

The best way to get acpi working is through re-compiling your kernel with acpi enabled. You should be able to find a tutorial through google inorder to do this... or you could just use slackware

Yep, Linux a laptop is a wonderful thing!!

Due to severe fiscal restraints, all I have right now is my good old IBM TP 365XD (P120/72MB/3.2GB). It's running Mandrake 9.1 with IceWM as the window manager. It's very stable (not perfect, just "very"!) even when running OpenOffice.org 1.1.

I gave up dual booting a couple of years ago, and while other members of the household run Windoze, they do admire my little machine.

Cuzzle - How long did it take and how long have you been using linux for in total ? (and are you a computer professional)

I'd like to do same with my laptop(Toshiba Tecra 9100) - have got Linux working on desktop & have been using it for 2mths now. - I don't have any computer training so learning "by doing" from scratch.

it's a great feeling indeed... when I got acpi up and running, I wiped windows off too
and the things I learned since then (forced because I did some stuff without thinking first, forcing myself into searching for ipconfig /release equivalents and stuff like that) are incredible. The roughest things will come next year when my university will attempt to force me into using windows-applications, but I'll attempt to find an open source implementation, or run it through wine we'll see, at least windows is not coming back on my laptop

We read so few success stories that maybe this is a good thread to tell one. My wife's folks recently gave her a Toshiba Satellite A15-S127 loaded with XP. Needless to say, I couldn't wait to get my grubby hands on it! At the time, I'd been toying with the cd distros, and happened to be playing with Morphix-Gnome 4.0. I set the Bios on the Toshiba to boot from cdrom, put Morphix in the beverage tray, she booted right up and found and configured ALL the software except the winmodem! I then installed Morphix to HD. To go wireless, I bought a Linksys Wireless-G router ((WRT54G) and a Proxism Orinico Gold PCMCIA PC card which is backward compatible to 802.11b. Everything worked right out of the box, and I didn't even have to open a terminal! AMAZING! The range on the card is really good, and now my wife can compute from anywhere in the house and outside which is a huge benefit with two small children. That was a week ago, and everything continues to work perfectly!

Congratulations on the switch! I myself am toying with the notion of wiping the WinXP partition on my laptop. Here are my specs.

Compaq Presario 2500 (2545US)
Pentium4 @~2.5Ghz
512Mb memory
ATI Radeon IGP 345M Video (64Mb / TFT SXGA display)
ALi Fast Infrared Controller
Conexant 56k ACLink Modem
Conexant AC-Link Audio
DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive
Nat. Semiconductor DP83815 PCI Fast Ethernet
HP WLAN 54g W450 (Broadcom chipset)
Synaptics Touchpad

The only thing that is keeping me from completely moving to Linux is the built in wireless on my laptop.

Seems the block device (/dev/wlan0) wasn't created and I haven't yet figured out how to create it manually. So, my search continues.

Congrats again!

well, success stories here i come. i bought (without knowledge of being able to download ) Redhat 9 this recent saturday. I spent from 3 oclock in the afternoon to 2 oclock in the morning trying to install it. i finally gave up and decided i was going to have to stick with windows . The next day, after scouring the different forums, i had found that someone gave me a tip as to what to do...It turns out the reason Redhat wasn't working properly was because i my monitor (w/e HP installed on my laptop) wasn't supported. I had to choose VESA (generic) when choosing monitors.

you should have seen the joy on my face as i saw firstboot load the set up program. it was like Christmas for a four year old. I sat there, setting it up, occasially glancing at my 6-disk-Windows XP setup disks, thinking to myself "should i burn them now, or later"

Thankfully i don't have to worry about the wireless thing. I have most, if not all, problems fixed (for now) and Linux is running waaaaaaaay faster than windows every did. everything is easier too.

The one problem i did have was when starting up it would hang at pcmcia when i had my network cable plugged in. I fixed that though-disabled pcmcia. as far as i know, having pcmcia disabled has not hurt my system in any way shape or form.

YAY FOR LINUX!

btw-i stopped windows cold turkey

On a sad note my work moved over to using a in-house app that needs windows to run. Sigh. So windows has a very small partition again :-( I have a friend (much smarter than me) working on getting it ported/emulated in linux. Helps that he worked on the app so has the source code. I hope to soon be free again.