Dell Inspiron2600 Laptop and Linux

[John Heim]

Probably the only thing to consider is that debian
I am not familiar with BSD but i know debian uses the same init.d structure 
as SunOS. So knowing debian, I didn't have to relearn anything to 
start/restart services on a Sun machine. So if you are familiar with BSD, 
you might find debian easier to learn than Red Hat.

Are you saying your laptop doesn't have a serial port? I have a laptop that 
I use for exactly the purpose you describe below. It's so old that it 
doesn't have USB.  But it does have a serial port.  I run debian on my 
laptop and then when I want to connect, I use kermit. I set up a couple of 
aliases to pass a config file to kermit when starting it up.

I have also used a USB to serial converter cable to connect 2 machines. That 
was extraordinarily easy. When I plugged in the USB cable, the kernel 
detected it and loaded the appropriate driver. Then I was able to run kermet 
on that device and log into the other machine.  Way cool and very easy.

I have another newer laptop  that somebody just *gave* me because the 
battery is dead. I want to set it up as a talking dumb terminal in our 
server room. But my boss doesn't want me to mess around with that.  Some day 
though...

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin McCormick" <martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu>
To: "Linux for blind general discussion" <blinux-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2007 4:12 PM
Subject: Dell Inspiron2600 Laptop and Linux


> My wife had one Windows crash too many and bought a new
> Mac. I will soon inherit the laptop and hope to put Linux on it,
> giving it a whole new lease on life as there appears to be
> nothing wrong with the hardware.
>
> I plan on using this primarily at work on those
> occasions when I could go to a building and connect to a serial
> port on a FreeBSD server which is, for whatever reason, not on
> the network.  Of course, it will hopefully be useful for
> anything else one would use a portable computer for, but this is
> my main plan. As it is, I would need to buy one of those USB to
> serial converters for the serial port, but the system does have
> a sound card which I will probably need to use for the speech.
> Are any of the free distributions likely to be best to try
> first?
>
> I'll certainly let everybody know how this goes. Thank
> you.
>
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
> Systems Engineer
> OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
>
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