Adventures with a TC1000

Journal JWSmythe's Journal: Adventures with a TC1000 1

Journal by JWSmythe on Thursday August 06, 2009 @03:16AM

As any of you who read my journal know, I was laid off a couple months ago. Nope, no luck on the job front, and no unemployment to carry me through.

I've been picking up the odd jobs here and there, but they rarely pay for much more than cigarettes and gas. Otherwise, I've been living by the good graces of friends. If I didn't have my friends, I would have starved to death over a month ago. Thanks to all of you.

Now, on with my journal rant. :)

My laptop died. Well, the power jack on the back died. No power means no laptop. A friend has loaned me his old Compaq TC1000. It's a 1Ghz Transmeta with 768Mb RAM. I put a 100Gb hard drive in that I had laying around.

I thought it would be a brilliant plan to dual boot it. WinXP on one partition, and Slackware Linux on another. It's working pretty well, but I'd like to share some comparisons.

Both OS's are completely up to date. In the Windows world, that means it's bloated beyond use. In the Linux world, it's nice and fast.

With XP, I've removed absolutely everything that I could find that wasn't necessary to save CPU time and memory. I did every tweak I could.

With Slackware, I haven't tweaked it yet. I did a full install, but only enabled the essential services. I currently have it running Gnome.

With XP, it was an interesting exercise of copying drivers to a USB drive, and then copying them onto the tablet, so I could install them. After several rounds of that, I got online. It wasn't just the network driver that needed help. There was so much to do, it took me several days to get things working almost properly.

With Linux, the wired ethernet adapter just worked. The wireless adapter wanted a firmware binary, which I found and dropped into place. I ran into some glitches with the video driver in Xorg, but nothing show stopping. I had Linux running in a matter of about an hour, and a few more hours tweaking Xorg.

To browse the net, say for viewing here, it was an interesting exercise.

MSIE on XP is so slow it's unusable. Even when I'm attached to someone's wireless at a good connection, it feels like I'm on a 9600 baud connection.

Firefox on XP is tolerable for the first few minutes, but then it ends up sucking up too much memory and CPU time. I did several tweaks, but that hasn't helped much.

Google Chrome on XP is my answer there. It actually behaves moderately well.

So, now Slackware.

Even with the limited resources, Firefox on Linux performs just about as I'd expect. It can be a little slow on occasion (as is normal for a Transmeta, from what I've read), but generally it's kicking along just like it should.

There is no offical Chrome yet, so I haven't tried.

I was going to try some of the other browser, but haven't bothered yet.

I'm using this tablet as my GPS also. I had purchased Garmin's MobilePC software a while back. It works in Windows fine, as long as I shut everything else down first. In Linux, it works fine under Xorg, but since it was bundled with it's own GPS receiver, it wants to see that to activate all the functions. I'm still working on that part. I found that it should work, but I haven't made it work yet.

I'm writing this right now from the tablet, using Firefox under Linux. I had noticed that using Firefox under XP, I could type out lines, and wait for them to display. I could get up to 2 lines ahead, which is very sad. With Firefox under Linux, it's hept right up with me the whole time. That's always nice to see, since I type over 100wpm. :)

Ok, enough of my random ramblings. If you didn't want them, you wouldn't read my journal. :)

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