Hot Rodding Your Slightly Dated Laptop For Fun and Profit

By: Rob Reilly
Monday, November 18, 2002 10:42:26 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4547/1/

Wrenching On A Laptop?

Are you skittish about putting Linux on your laptop because the installation will be hard and it will be tough to find the right drivers? Are you worried that you're going to be limited to command-line based applications, especially on that old corporate laptop that moves like molasses under the weight of XP? Do you have big reservations about putting a brand new $2500 2.0-Ghz whiz-bang laptop on the X-ray belt at the airport?

Fear not, fellow computer mechanics.

You can put that slightly used road warrior back into service with a new lease on life using Linux and a few laptop performance secrets. With certain modifications you can expect to be able to run the Linux desktop/window manager of your choice (including KDE, Gnome or IceWM), an SQL server, Apache, Samba, OpenOffice.org, 5 or 6 Xterms and not really even break a sweat. I was happily computing away just yesterday with 80 processes showing up on top!

My hot-rodding tips apply to just about any recent laptop. You may also be surprised to hear that there are some real disadvantages to running the latest and greatest when it comes to laptops. I'll explain those later.

Cheap Thrills That Boost Performance

Here are five tips to get you started on your way to notebook Nirvana.

1. Get a laptop that allows at least 128 MB of memory. More definitely equals better. I have 256 MB and am extremely happy with the performance. Anything less than 64 MB is going to be just plain painful. The good news is... have you seen the price of PC100 laptop memory lately? You can get 128 MB DIMMS for $15 (via rebates) at consumer computer retailers. Super secret hint: check the retail office supply chains. Better get 'em while they're hot. You might want to pick up some extra memory for those other Linux desktop servers you have running around the shop, since it's so cheap. You'll need to do your homework to figure out what memory is compatible with your machine, of course.

A friend of mine from the LUG recently was jumping for joy after he upgraded his 266-Mhz PII laptop from 64 MB to 128 Megs. In a typical LUG meeting, his machine encodes audio for broadcasting over the Web, runs the WindowMaker desktop anrd Mozilla, and has an installation going for some package that he is talking about during the meeting.

My old PII 300-Mhz no-name clone would accept two 128 MB DIMMS. The maximum amount of memory you can use depends on your BIOS and the memory slots on your box, so that's something you will have to check. Put in as much as you can. I've estimated that going from 128 to 256 MB gave me at least a 50% increase in speed across the board. You will notice the difference.

2. On a four-year-old laptop, the disk is now considered a classic. Go ahead and spend $100 on a 10-GB disk and be done with it! That old 2.1 or 4 GB relic of a drive doesn't have enough space anyway. My old drive started clicking and showing minor data errors in /var/log/messages. When I had to run fsck and recover data a few times, I knew it was time for a change. I've loaded KDE, GNOME, FVWM2, PostgreSQL, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Apache, SAMBA, some audio streaming stuff, plus all kinds of other tools and still have almost 4 GB of space left on my shiny new 10 Gigger. Life on a laptop is wonderful with lots of memory and a new disk.
3. Next, pick your distribution. I ran Red Hat 6.0 (coexisting with Windows 98) a couple of years ago. Early in 2002, I upgraded to SuSE 7.3 Professional and am quite happy with their offering. At the time, SuSE seemed to bundle more applications than Red Hat 7.2 for roughly the same price, around $70. As for dual booting... huh, what's that?

All of the late-model distros run the 2.4 kernel. The installation procedures have made giant leaps for ease of use, recently. I've seen lots of laptops that load the distros without a hitch.

I've only had a couple of minor irritations with installations and applications. One was with the USB kernel modules. SuSE wanted to load the driver for OHCI type USB controller chip by default and mine was a UHCI type. Check for the "blacklist" file for the USB controller and change it to suit your situation.

The other problem, again with USB, was that my equally old USB web cam (it cost me about $170 four years ago) loaded its driver and then would promptly lock up the laptop. The only way to recover it was to power-off the beast and reboot. The same camera seemed to work OK with Xawtv on my (new) 700-Mhz PIII desktop, but had the wrong video format for use with Gnomemeeting. Kind of defeats the purpose of a web cam on a laptop. Oh well, maybe I can sell the camera, as an antique on eBay in a few years.

4. Should you care if your machine crashes? Heck no, why worry? I partitioned my cool new drive with a journaling file system. There are several to choose from and since SuSE defaults to ReiserFS, that's the one I've used. I can't tell you how much time and uncertainty this has saved me. With a new disk and a journaling FS you are just about guaranteed to have no disk related problems.

   That's not to say that once in a blue moon there may be an exception. The machine is on all the time when I'm at home, like any good Linux system should be and I've not had so much as a hiccup. Occasionally, I've brought the machine home after working at a client site and started it up without the power plugged in. Then in the middle of the night, the battery would run down and the machine would simply power off. Next morning, I would just plugged in the power, hit the "on" button and within about a minute and a half am back up and running. No fuss, no waiting for FSCK to finish and no data loss.

5. Try to get two batteries when you acquire your laptop. Let's face it, four-year-old battery technology leaves something to be desired, even though they probably are lithium-ion. When I ran Red Hat 6.0 two years ago, a full charge was worth almost two hours. Now, with the bigger drive, more memory and more stuff going on with SuSE on the box, battery life is about 1.5 hours.

   Hey, that's OK. Power down, put in the other battery, and go for another hour and a half. Shoot, I bet if you booted up only in the command line and just edited some documents with VI you could stretch it out to 2.5 hours. You sure can't do that on one of these machines with Windows 2000. Also, laptops are made to be portable. Just plan your work accordingly and keep an eye on the power meter bar.

Four Reasons To Shade-Tree Mechanic A Linux Laptop

1. Cost. If you've been using a laptop for a while, chances are that Linux will run great on it. Two-, three-, or four-year-old machines are prime candidates. Many times laptops feed an ego and people get new ones every few years to keep up the image. Used ones are getting more plentiful all the time. Most of the drivers have been sorted out and everything usually loads without any major effort.

   Plus, if you look around, somebody might even give you their "old, obsolete" machine. If the laptop is a very early Pentium or 486, you can probably still use it as an X terminal on your network. Take a look at the Linux Terminal Server Project. If someone gives you a laptop, try not to look too anxious and be sure to tell them how spiffy their new mega gigahertz Pentium 12 sub-notebook looks.

2. The older laptops had screens that were easily managed in a notebook form. My 14.1 inch 1024 x 768 16M color display works great. I can put it on a client's desk and actually see the client because the screen isn't too tall. Lots of newer laptops have bigger screens that just seem overwhelming while sitting on the table in an important meeting. You will certainly have enough attention running Linux on your machine to begin with--no sense in aggravating the situation with a huge LCD.

3. A 300-Mhz PII laptop can comfortably sit on your lap without burning the tops of your thighs to crispy cinders. The only way to position a 1.0-Ghz plus machine on your lap is to keep the power turned off.
4. Security and stealth. Laptops get stolen all the time. Put your refurbished PII Linux laptop in a "slightly" tattered computer bag and go on the road in stealth mode. Who's going to steal a derelict old laptop in a raggedy old computer bag? My lawyer brother gets the credit for this idea. You know how "thrifty" and cautious lawyers can be. Great idea, though. Do backups on a regular basis (I use an external USB Iomega ZipCD 650 burner) , keep the CDs in your packed luggage, and be confident that if the machine does get stolen, you aren't out two or three thousand dollars. You can also take comfort in knowing that you have an extremely powerful, cutting edge, server/workstation that just doesn't look like much, until you power up and plug in to the network. The one upmanship value here is excellent.

Accessories And Detailing For Your Sleeper Linux Machine

Here's some more simple ideas for tricking out your Linux laptop.

Get some headphones and pack in your favorite CDs or Ogg files. I write many of my stories happily listening to Santana or some jazz while hammering away on my laptop keyboard. Headphones plug right in the side and provide great sound. On high-bitrate streams and files you seem to need at least 128 MB of RAM and a 266-Mhz PII system. Otherwise, you'll get annoying skips when trying to play a 128 bps audio stream. Most mainstream laptop sound chips seem to be supported in the modern distributions of Linux. XMMS is my audio player of choice. You might have to change permissions on the /dev/hdc device so the player can access the CD as a user.

If you use a 10/100 Ethernet card either buy or make a 10-foot Cat 5 cable. Get the patch type cable because it tends to be rather pliable and easy to coil up for storage in your computer bag. You could also carry a short cross-over cable too, for easy two-computer networking and transfers. Don't forget to start up your DHCP and Samba server to communicate with that "other OS" machine. You probably have those processes starting at boot time anyway, since you are running a Linux server/workstation.

Personally, I'm going to be switching over to an 802.11 card pretty soon. Think of it, a powerful, portable Linux server/workstation with wireless capability. It opens up all manner of client integration opportunities. In an office, in the pits at a race, or on the field at the high school football game. Web enabled database applications, complex graphics programs, and real time portable data entry/consolidation all can be a reality on your lowly old refurbed laptop. How about coupling your wireless Linux server/workstation with some wireless PDAs for portable inventory control systems? Does that make any sense? I'm thinking about on-site seminars and CBT opportunities using wireless Linux laptops and projectors. Seems like endless possibilities to me.

Get yourself a mouse or small track ball. I think a serial wheel mouse is much better than one of those little red keyboard pencil erasers or a touch pad. A serial or PS/2 mouse doesn't take up much space and is cheap. Plus, the PS/2 mouse won't take up a valuable USB connector.

Closing the Hood And Cranking The Engine

Running Linux on a laptop is much easier than it was even a year ago. And it's getting easier almost daily. Most of the Linux integrators, that I know, are now running laptops, every day, in their consulting businesses. We've all heard the recent debates about Linux on the desktop. Some recent articles I've read even say that the desktop's days are numbered, considering the horsepower in current laptops.

Use the secrets outlined in this article, forget about who is going to win the desktop race and get out there and conquer the computing world on an inexpensive, powerful, rock solid and "warmed over" Linux laptop. You'll smile, your clients will smile and you won't even have to clean the grease out from under your fingernails.