Comments on: A Free-Software Only Laptop

By: etbe

etbe — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:35:07 +0000

Gunnar: You are correct that the laptop feature of a built-in UPS works well for a server.

Pity that more than one hard drive (for RAID) is either impossible or unreasonably expensive and that expansion of any part of the hardware is also difficult.

But I have considered making an old laptop into a router with a couple of PCMCIA Ethernet cards and a USB Ethernet device. Routing cable Internet speeds is not a challenge for old hardware and the inefficient USB Ethernet interface.

By: Gunnar Wolf

Gunnar Wolf — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:40:25 +0000

[...] Russell argues (when talking about Mark’s proposed high-end Free Software-based laptop) that laptops are hard (or expensive) hardware to modify and repurpose - Maybe your laptop will one day go to your child or something like that, but it’s hard for it to be a server.I disagree.One of my most faithful and most beloved home servers was my old laptop, a Compaq Armada 4120 we originally got (used, for that matter) in 1998 and that was my main laptop until 2002, when I got my first Dell. 120MHz Pentium, 16 MB RAM (later upgraded to 32), 2GB hard disk.From 2002 and until around 2005, it was my home server - Think about it: A low-power, compact machine you can store anywhere, and that has (still today! Wish I could say that for ~2 year old machines…) a two hour battery with the LCD on. We swapped the hard disk for a 40GB one around 2003, and it was just perfect for DSL sharing, Samba file serving to our internal network, and simple, personal HTTP server. Of course, it started aching when Nadezhda and I started running our blogs - MySQL and Apache didn’t fit in the memory at the same time :)For some months, we had an old 1GHz Athlon as our server, but it was too noisy and ate too much electricity - We now have a nice Mac Mini, but share the UPS with Nadezhda’s main machine. Which is fine, but takes a bit off the coolness factor :) Oh, and -of course- it does not have a built-in screen anymore. Nadezhda uses an iMac, so whenever we need to directly use the server, I have to go find our clunky 17″ CRT and work sitting on the floor… gwolf | General, Life | 17 July, 10:10am | Comment on this On collaborative maintenance [...]

By: University Update - Linux - A Free-Software Only Laptop

University Update - Linux - A Free-Software Only Laptop — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:48:47 +0000

[...] Link to Article linux A Free-Software Only Laptop » Posted at etbe on Monday, July 16, 2007 [...]

By: Corey Burger

Corey Burger — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:28:58 +0000

I seriously doubt those Linspire laptops are Free Software. However, you can buy good laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled from a little vendor called Dell, who are working to make all their laptops work with only Free software. Or you can try System76.