OT: UNIX on Windows

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fairlight" <fairlite at fairlite.com>
To: "filePro Mailing List" <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 1:51 AM
Subject: Re: OT: UNIX on Windows


> Confusious (Bill Campbell) say:
>>
>> I've been running Linux on a variety of laptops, mostly IBM ThinkPads, 
>> for
>> the last seven years.  The one I'm typing this on is a five year old
>> ThinkPad 600 that's run Caldera OpenLinux 1.3, OpenLinux 2.3, eDesktop 
>> 2.4,
>> SuSE 8.1, 8,2, 9.0, and now 9.2.  I'm connected to our in-house wi-fi
>> network with a USB 802.11b.  If I remember correctly, I had this laptop
>> working as an Internet hub in the dorms at at least one SCO Forum with a
>> Ricochet wireless modem which JP and others were using with their laptops
>> running Windows or OpenServer (or perhaps that was my previous
>> ThinkPad 750).
>>
>> My first Linux installs on a laptop were on a Toshiba with no CD, and 
>> that
>> was a bit tricky.  I had to tweak the PCMCIA configuration files during a
>> floppy install to get it to recognize a newer 3com NIC so I could do an 
>> NFS
>> install.  That was probably Caldera Network Desktop 1.0.  Today SuSE
>> Professional series from 8.0 and up have Just Worked(tm) without any
>> special handling.
>>
>> My next laptop may well be an Apple PowerBook or iBook if I can get 
>> around
>> their stupid touchpads.  I've gotten very used to the IBM eraser type
>> mouse, never using an external mouse.
>
> Okay, let me ask this...how -do- you get around laptop "mice" like 
> touchpads
> that are the touchpad type and apparently require special drivers?  They
> don't work as a "regular" mouse under 'doze.  (I'm thinking of my Digital
> HiNote VP for example.)
>
> I'm not sure I even want to know about X11.  For that matter, how would 
> one
> handle X on an LCD flatscreen?  Do they even -have- sync rates and dot
> pitch in the conventional sense?

They all look like a ordinary ps/2 mouse in hardware.

Sometimes there is a special driver that provides the fancy features like 
recognizing various forms of tapping and strokes and hot-spots, like the 
synaptics driver for my hp that has a area on the right that works like a 
scroll-wheel on a mouse. But the driver is totally optional. Without it, the 
whole touch pad just works like a plain ps/2 mouse and the scroll-wheel area 
is just more mouse pad area.

If you had one that didn't do that it was by far the exception. I've never 
seen or heard of a touch pad on any manufacturer laptop that didn't work as 
a ps/2 mouse.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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