[plug] Notebooks and Knoppix

[Andrew Furey]

Howdy folks,

A bit of a long post, but I thought I'd combine two
related posts in one, since I'm here now...


I'm in the market for a new notebook (in the next 6
weeks or so) in the <$3k price range (maybe up to
$3.5k if really needed). Anyone have any particular
models they can recommend?

My requirements are:
Debian compatible (obviously)
Builtin floppy (this knocks out ~60% of the current
models, I know)
Builtin CD drive (burner of some sort would be handy,
maybe a joint DVD-ROM + CD-RW)
10/100 Ethernet port
Touchpad
Celeron/P4 (not AMD, too hot for my lap...)

Optional extras:
Serial port (this was originally in the requirements
section, but there seem to be slim pickings - was
mainly wanted to test external modems, but I don't do
that too often)
Builtin wireless
512M RAM (or as an upgrade, probably not a problem
with any model)
>= 30Gb HDD (20 is a little cramped on my current
system - again, maybe an upgrade option)



My other related question is to do with my Dad's
laptop (an Optima Centoris, as available at Dick Smith
for $2.4k). I've tried to run Knoppix on it to test
the hardware.

Everything seems to work fine, until I get to loading
KDE itself. It gets as far as "Initialising
peripherals" (or some such), the icon blinks a couple
of times as normal, and then... nothing. Hard lockup.
Hello, Mr. Power Button. :(

I can of course get around this by using one of the
other window managers, but I'll most likely be using
KDE or GNOME when I install Debian, so I wanted to see
what the speed, etc. was like. I've tried disabling
the various options on the boot menu, to no avail. I'm
going to try the latest Knoppix (from 3 days ago)
tonight, see if that changes anything.

A bit of Googling reveals a couple of folks with
crashes at the same place in the startup, but in both
cases they were using official Woody, not Knoppix, and
both machines simply crashed back to the login, rather
than freezing.

Any ideas?

Andrew


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