User Feedback :: Hardware report



I Don't see a 'hardware compatibility' thread, so I'll add my experience here.

Got DSL installed on a Compaq Armada 7770DMT I inherited from a colleague with NT on it.

I added the ethernet card D-Link DFE-670TXD and after several tries it connected. Several tries because I had to go through threating the labtop with Knoppix, DesktopBSD and Ubuntu before it succumbed to my iron will. Not the cheapest ethernet card on the market, but it's what a pro dealer advised for exactly my lab top, so I took the safe exit and paid up.

After mimicing a re-install of DSL, it suddenly worked. :-)

The speed on the 233mHz, 128mb ram is sufficient and much better than feared. Great for email and office tasks while the most heavy websites lingers on. But a labtop really isn't the tool made to surf the net.

I see labtops as exactly what it does. 1) Reading email on the go, and 2) doing simple officetasks on out-of-office ttravels. Of course a lot of information can be necessary to find on the internet while travelling, but heavy entertainment websurfing isn't so actual for lab top travellers on business.

Now I am waiting for the new battery I ordered overseas and I've got a little devil of a labtop with a great and fast OS on it for app. euro135.-

What is particularly nice about even the tiny DSL is, that it supports Danish keyboard and characters.

It'll make one heck of a home, amateur web server with low power consumption and quiet too.

Now I'll be looking for other sexy hardware to add, like USB and external hard drives or a cd-burner.

Thanks to the guys behind Damn Great Linux!
Welcome to the Revolution!!!

P.S.  DSL is and does make older hardware fully internet capable...yes firefox is bloated, but if you used Dillo, it would have popped right up on that sucker!

Brian
AwPhuch
I have a compaq Armada 7800 (266 96Megs) and DSL runs fine.  I have an external Pacific Digital CDRW drive and it works great (burns at about 4 times speed which isn't fast but I can have a beer while waiting).  I have even used my laptop as a server to test Xterminal setup (very breifly and I am waiting to get a full system set up before I do much more with servers).  I recently reinstalled win98 (I work on other windows systems so I thought having a partition with win installed may be a good idea, boy I had forgotten how resource intense windows is).  I may eventually use that partition for some dos stuff (we have two slower laptops for the kids, compaq 486 and Panasonic toughbook 133 both seem to be about the same speed which mainly run dos for the kids).  The armada is nice to work with I just wish the setup was built in so I didn't need to build a setup disk every time I needed to make bios changes (actually it is not very often it is just a pain when required).  I would like to get a slightly faster laptop to either watch dvds or vcds.  No matter what DSL will be the OS of choice for anything I run in the future.  It offers everything I need and no bloat to bog things down (any bloat comes from slef infliction when I play around).  As for internet connections I find the connection speed the bottle neck not the laptop.

original here.