The purpose of this document is merely to show what runs and what doesn't run in Linux, with this laptop. It is not intended to help you decide what laptop to buy. It is not meant as a complete installation guide, but it may become that in the future.
On the whole I am quite pleased with this model's Linux compatibility. I bought it in January 2003.
Choosing a laptop, with the further requirement of Linux compatibility, can easily become a pain. Before buying, I tried to make an educated guess on what to buy, but soon gave up because the models for which there was information were either out of sale or not available in Adelaide, Australia (official population 1 million, I would say more like 300 000). Compaq laptops, along with Dell, are for now the only Red Hat 'certified' laptops, as far as I know. The only way to get Dell here seems to be by mail order --- annoying when dealing with such an expensive item, I always prefer to see the thing. I also dislike buying 'unknown' brands, whatever the price difference. I would gladly have bought Panasonic (yes, I have 'Panasonitis') but I've yet to see a Panasonic laptop in a shop, in Adelaide at least. So I decided to buy a Compaq model for which I had no specific information, and it seems I was lucky so far. It also had a 10 per cent discount (having this discount seems to limit some of the warranty advantages regarding exchange/refunds, I wonder if this is legal). I would venture to say that Compaq is a pretty safe choice, but don't take my word for it. I myself may decide to buy a Japanese brand next time, but for reasons other than technical :-)
The following things work fine, nost of them almost 'out of the box', with Red Hat 8.0, (using the default kernel) or with extra drivers on the internet.
The CD/DVD-ROM can burn CDs from command line (using mkisofs/cdrecord). I couldn't get a gcombust RPM to work properly, but koncd works fine. Mind you, the indicated speeds are probably rarely attained. Some practical tests I have done on other drives actually produce real speeds of about 1/10 to 1/4 of the ones they boast (I'll post the details some time, the amount of lying in CD specs is outrageous!!! Sophisticated concepts like peak speed or what not don't matter, what we're really interested in as consumers is sustained performance, and we're not getting that. For example, an LG CD drive for desktop computers boasted 52X, but actually turned out to be a lame 7-8 X while reading a whole CD. Speed 1X is supposed to mean 150 Kbytes/second. Good tests are supposed to eliminate the influence of other factors, like hard disk transfer rates or CPU speed (but as far as I know, hard disks are a lot faster than current optical drives, so this should not change the test much).
It's a little hard these days to get a decent floppy drive, because either the drives or the disks are often faulty, I get a lot more errors than I did 5 years ago. My explanation is that the industry is again trying to persuade consumers to change to a new technology only for the sake of change, before that technology is comparably matured. They probably do less quality checks for floppy drives/disks because they want to get rid of them (i.e. "the competition is making money marketing a 'new and better' product so why shouldn't we? Never mind that the new product is not better in every respect...").
