by I posted a message specific to XFree in the appropriate newsgroup
(can't get Xconfg set up, the usual story), but I would like to
enquire about this notebook in general here. I will summarize all
responses.
I have a contura 4/25 with 12 meg ram and 120 meg drive and "passive
matrix" monochrome vga. This is a 486 "SL" running at 25mhz. Linux
runs quite well. In fact, this little notebook runs noticably than my
tower 386/387DX-33 which is itself reasonably fast. The lcd screen is
quite clear in 50 line mode. If only I could get x working...
There are some keyboard idiosyncracies. For example, the numlock is
active on boot up which is quite a burden on a keyboard with an
embedded numeric key pad. I fixed this by modifying the definition of
a constant in keyboard.c and recompiling the kernel (is there a better
way to do this?). Another keyboard weirdness is that the home, end,
pgup, pgdn, insert and delete produce key codes that linux doesn't
understand. I'm sure there is a way to deal with this, I just haven't
dug in very much (unlike the X stuff). If you can use international
keyboards it should be easy to fix.
Although the serial port uses a 16450 uart, I don't notice any
difference using SLIP on a 14.4k modem as compared to my 386 which as
the buffered uart.
The trackball on the ps2 port is "detected" by selection, but the
wires seem to be crossed. That is, moving the mouse causes a click.
I'm using selection -t ps2 and /dev/mouse is linked to /dev/ps2aux.
Maybe the mouse uses a ps2 style port but understands a different
protocal. I'll have to experiment.
Gimme you contura stories and tidbits and I will summarize. I'll
summarize X stuff to the appropriate newsgroup and linux stuff to the
misc news group.
Thanks in advance,
Rich