MEPIS Community Forum

I could

I just saw a < compaq> notebook in a post xmas sale catalogue for $338
- even comes with a HP multi function printer

-> at this price - I could just 'blow away' any rubbish that was on the hdd
-> and install some 'nix O/Ss !!.

- has 2Gb ram & a 320Gb hdd - so half reasonable spec's too.


any one else have < post xmas> similar thoughts?.

I bought a Compaq laptop last April for just under $300 at Walmart. The specs sound very much like yours. I considered deleting the software on it (Win 7) and replacing it with Mepis 11.0 but decided not to when the live disk of Mepis had trouble making the wireless work (I never really investigated why); I bought the machine to be able to use it on a motel (or McDonalds, etc) WiFi system while we were evacuated from a flood. I didn't want to take the chance that I wouldn't have a WiFi laptop if I had to use it again - and I did when an infection put me in the hospital/nursing home for two months. I use DropBox to transfer data files between the laptop and my home system. That ties the two different OS's together very nicely. I have loaded LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird. and Pidgin (and AVG free to take care of the viruses that Windows gets) on it so it has about the same software I use most often in Mepis.

@Burt

Any reason not to set up a dual boot install?

Yeah, I picked up a Compaq Presario CQ56-219WM notebook from Walmart some months back. 2 GB RAM. 250 GB hard drive. I think it was $298 or something like that. That model is no longer being sold at Walmart

I put Mepis 11 and Ubuntu 11.04 on it. It's been fine but I don't know about the wireless because I don't use it. I've read about Linux users having trouble with wireless with this line of notebooks, though.

I mainly use my pc at home, and use a notebook as a spare computer, so the Compaq doesn't actually get much use. But it seems to have been a good deal. I booted into Windows once to have a look around, then one more time to copy some stuff, then wiped Windows out and installed Linux, and that was it.

I've yet to run into a situation where I couldn't get wireless working using the XP drivers and ndiswrapper, per the CLI instructions found under "Using Ndiswrapper" in the Wiki. The trick is getting the raw XP driver, as opposed to the installer .exe that is usually offered from the manufacturer. Sometimes you can get at it using cabextract on the installer, sometimes you have to go on a hunt.

Yes, Compaq used all 4 primary partitions and I decided I didn't want to mess with them by using a logical partition. It is primarily an emergency system to me, and I don't want to mess it up. I do enough of that on my home systems!

Gotta love it. The OEMs that to that should be taken out and shot. There is absolutely no excuse (or need) for that. I can't decide whether it's due to malice (trying to prevent dual boot setups) or stupidity.

I gave up on Compaq years ago. They always seemed to have weird setups and hardware.

Yes, that's how mine came, too. From my notes:

sda1: ntfs, 199.00 MiB (“SYSTEM”)
sda2: ntfs, 213.72 GiB (no label)
sda3: ntfs, 18.86 GiB (“RECOVERY”)
sda4: fat32, 103.18 MiB (“HP_TOOLS”)

I think I got that info from kde-partition-manager. Not sure what you'd have to do with that if you wanted to set up a Windows-Linux dual-boot (in my case, I simply deleted all four partitions -- I just don't wanna be bothered with Windows here).

Finally went back and found out how much this notebook cost me. $278 bucks. Not bad for what I'm using it for.

sda1 is most likely a boot partition, and sda4 should just be all the drivers and crapware. That last one is what I'd look to blow out. Then shrink sda2, creating space for an extended between it and sda3.