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From: sastdr@torpid.unx.sas.com (Thomas David Rivers)
Subject: Re: Un*x on laptop/notebook
Summary: Success.
Sender: news@unx.sas.com (Noter of Newsworthy Events)
Message-ID: <C3BH64.Dw5@unx.sas.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1993 14:20:28 GMT
References: <9306211.12030@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
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Organization: SAS Institute Inc.
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I'm running 386bsd on a CompuAdd 325TX (which just went on sale - they're
phasing them out.)

It has an AMD 386SL (25 Mhz); with a Cyrix Math Coprocessor; 8 megs
of memory, and a standard VGA card which has "Cirrus" written all over it.
The hard disk (IDE) is a Toshiba MK2124 - 120 megabytes.  [I would *love*
to get something larger, if anyone knows where/how.]

I run monochrome X with no problems, using the trackball that comes with
the laptop as the mouse.


The only real problem I had was getting the laptop to boot after the
initial hard drive installation.  The default boot blocks failed miserably; 
and even Julian's new boot blocks (which use the BIOS) didn't work.

Apparently, there is something going funny in the BIOS call which reports
the boot device.  When I hard-coded the boot device (to 0x80 - the first
hard disk) on the INT 13 which loads the initial sector (in Julian's new
boot blocks) - I had no problem.

The only thing that seems to be going on now; is every now and then, for
no really apparent reason, the system locks up - but I'm not even sure if
it is a fault of the laptop, or just a different problem in 386bsd.  
I haven't experienced the same lock-ups with my other (non-laptop) machines.


As far as "useability" - although slower than my 386DX machines, the laptop
seems to be plenty nice enough for doing most things (C compiles, X, etc...)
My only complaints are:

  1) After loading up the binary distribution and XFree86-1.2; my hard disk
 has about 30 (of the original 120) free.  Now, I need to point out that
 a) I have a 30 meg swap partition, which could be made smaller, and b) I
 have separate /usr and / partitions, which is probably a bad idea, since it
 makes it difficult to use the remaining free space.

  2) The 800x600 virtual screen provided my the XFree86-1.2 monochrome server
 is too small to run xmahjongg. :-)


	- Dave Rivers -
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