Be Advised - HP has issued a recall for the power supplies of
these laptops, due to overheating and occasional spontaneous combustion.
You can (and, perhaps, should) write to the company and ask them to please
send you a replacement part that is less likely to kill you in your
sleep.
I've been running linux on the Compaq Armada v300 for about two years
now, and have found it to be a very reliable and flexible mobile
computing platform. I use it for basic websurfing and terminal
purposes, watching DiVX movies on airplane flights, GPS-wifi
mapping, print-serving, and writing. Strong points include RCA
video-out, a decent keyboard with wrist-support, USB, and an ATI Rage
Mobility video card for a modicum of 3D acceleration. The build-quality is
fairly high, though my impression is that the laptop was origanally
targeted to the low-end of the market. The going price on Ebay for one of
these boxes at the time of this writing (January, 2004) is about
$200-$300, but if you shop around a little you may be able to find them
for even less.
My company bought a batch of these for our sales staff, who ran Win2K
on them and was subsequently outraged by their inferior performance. Our
IT staff thought so little of them that I was able to buy two of them from
a company surplus sale for $50 each.
The Armada v300s I got came with a 466Mhz Celeron processor, 128MBs of
RAM, a 6.0GB hard drive, an ATI Rage Mobility 3D video chipset with
VGA-out, a Lucent WinModem, CD drive, floppy drive, one TYPE-1 PCMCIA
slot, one serial port, one paralel port, one SVGA-out port, one USB1 port,
one PS/2 port, an IR port, headphone & microphone ports, and a docking
station port. It has a 13.1" screen, it can display 800x600, and has a
battery life of approximately 27 seconds. I use either a Xircom 10/100
RJ45 ethernet pcmcia card or an Orinoco/Lucent Silver wi-fi pcmcia card,
depending on where I am.
I've run quite a few linux distros on the v300 including Slackware,
Debian, SUsE, RedHat, and now Fedora. Installation was straightforward
under all of these distributions, with the majority of the hardware being
detected automatically. For the sake of this paper, I'll cover Fedora Core
1.
Installation, as I said, was breezy. These laptops are old
enough and standard enough that the current distros have all the
requisite drivers and modules. Booting from the Fedora Core 1 install CD,
I chose the "Workstation" install and let the installer make the rest of
the decisions for me. The one exception to this was the Firewall section -
I chose "no firewall" because I prefer to use Tom Eastep's Shoreline Firewall to manage iptables.
The installer autodetected the ATI Rage chipset, but did not
successfully probe the screen resolution. I typically set the monitor
adapter type to "LCD Panel 800x600" and this generally works well, though
I'm not sure it is the ideal setting. You can snag a copy of my working XF86Config file, If that might be of any help to
you. I have tried a few different ways of getting DRI working, but to no
avail. Drop me a line if you find something that works, I'd be happy to
hear it.
After completing the install and rebooting the system, Fedora boots in all its new macintosh-ish graphical boot screen glory. This isn't the login screen provided by gdm, and it isn't even the popular bootsplash program, but is a graphical frame in which the plain old text of your boot messages is displayed. This apparently involves running xfree86 before the system gets to runlevel three, which is kinda nifty, but also rather slow, and a rather annoying as a default setting. The v300 is capable of running all of this snazzy GUI goo, but it does put a strain on the system's RAM resources. The same is true of aggressively methaphor-laden windowmanagers such as Fedora's defaults, Gnome and KDE.
You can take a few easy steps to turn down the
overall snazz level, however. The first thing I do is switch my default
runlevel to text-only mode, and then install a small-footprint
windowmanager like icewm, blackbox, or fluxbox. I think I can explain how
to do that in a few easy steps.
Once your system fully boots, you will be presented with the graphical
login screen, provided by the gdm program. Linux has a nifty feature
called virtual
consoles" which allows you to switch to a number of text-only
consoles, even while XFree86 is running. I don't even like to bother with
a GUI until I have a light and fast windowmanager installed, so at this
point you can hold down "Ctrl" and "Alt" while pressing the "F2" key in
order to switch to virtual-console #2. At this point, the machine presents
you with a text-based login screen.
You can now log into the v300 with the username "root" and the password
you selected during the install process. If you gave the install program
the proper settings during the "network configuration" phase of the
install, you should already be connected to your network. If you aren't
connected to your network. . . make it so. I can't explain fully how to do
that, here, so find a friend or poke around on deja.com for some tips. If
you know what you are doing, just type "netconfig" and everything should
be fairly self-explainatory.
A person's choice of windowmanagers is a very personal thing, and no
windowmanager works for everybody. . . except fluxbox. It ownz. These
instructions are fluxbox-specific, but you can follow them fairly
closely for afterstep, windowmaker, icewm, blackbox or whatever, except
that you won't be running any of those things when you are done - because
you will be running fluxbox. (You buy paper rock!) And just to be
prefectly clear, fluxbox is blackbox. . . but with more flux. And, also,
it is outstanding. You can find a copy at www.fluxbox.org, or you can grab
a fairly recent version by running:
If all has gone well so far, you have just downloaded the source code
of fluxbox to your /root directory. You can now install fluxbox by
following these commands:
Go back to some other page.
cd fluxbox-0.1.14
./configure
make
make install
And. . . yeah. Now go do stuff.