Rubénerd ツ

If you remember back a few weeks ago I posted that I had inherited a Compaq Armada M300 subnotebook. It’s no MacBook Air in the design department, but without optical and floppy disk drives, it’s very lightweight and small. It’s also several years old and has very conservative specs (600MHz Mobile PIII from 2002!) though, so it certainly won’t be running Windows Vista any time soon… which is just fine because my favourite OS (for non-Apple hardware of course!) is FreeBSD.

Before I go any further I have to say this right up front: FreeBSD in the mobile space has come a long way. Despite my preference for the BSDs I always told people up until recently that they were better off running a flavour of Linux such as Slackware or Gentoo (my two preferred distributions) if they wanted to run a free OS that was a bit more technical and capable on their laptops.

Not any more! I popped in a home burned CD of the latest release of FreeBSD (7.0-RELEASE) and booted the installer and was absolutely blown away by the hardware support. Not only did it detect the internal 10/100 ethernet port and the ATI graphics but the PCMCIA wireless card which has always been iffy in past experiences. After installing, booting for the first time, updating the base system, installing Gnome2-lite from ports and configuring Xorg I had a slick and completely usable desktop (rearranged to resemble Leopard of course!):

What also really blows me away is how responsive all the applications are, especially on a fully fledged DE like Gnome (which itself only takes a few seconds to start) and on such conservative hardware: granted I almost tripled the amount of built in memory from 128MiB to 320MiB and installed a new hard drive with a much larger cache than the previous stock!

I can really see myself using this instead of my MacBook Pro in settings such as coffee shops or for lectures where I’m only running a local wiki for note taking, editing source code and using email; the marketing for the Asus EeePC and the MacBook Air is starting to sink in it seems! I could have used Xfce, Fluxbox or the like, but I’m so impressed with Gnome’s performance as is, currently I don’t see the need.

I’m still in the early stages of setting this machine up with its new OS and DE, but I’ll post more information as I find out. On my current to do list: figure out if and how the "soft buttons" above the regular keyboard can be used somehow, getting high resolution console support compiled into the kernel and figuring out how to adjust the screen brightness on the fly. I haven’t tested the built-in modem yet as I haven’t needed it, but potentially getting that set up to send faxes would be useful too.

Though my father’s company I’ve been able to get a hold of a very svelte, thin, lightweight Compaq Armada M300 laptop, complete with docking station that provides the optical and disk drives!

The specifications are fairly conservative (as in old but still nice, not the icky political kind) so it won’t be running Windows Vista any time soon, but for a mostly FreeBSD guy like me who’s been wanting to try out his favourite OS in a mobile environment it’s just what I’ve been looking for:

Weight and Dimensions

1.5kg, less than 2.3cm thin when closed

Processor

Mobile Pentium III 600MHz with SpeedStep (whatever that means!)

Display

12.1″ TFT XGA display

Memory

128MiB PC133 SDRAM, upgradable to 320MiB

Audio

ES1978 Maestro 2E

Hard drive

40GB 5400RPM IDE Seagate

Networking

Belkin Wireless G PCMCIA card
Lucent LT WinModem (bummer!)
Ethernet Intel Ethernet Pro 100 (82557)

The only major downside is that the battery it came with is completely shot, it barely holds a charge. Fortunately now that I found a kickarse battery shop in Sim Lim Square, having the cells in it replaced shouldn’t be too expensive. I’ll probably want to get a tad more memory for it as well: a check on the current Singapore hardware pricelists shows that’ll cost less than SG$40.

With all this talk about ASUS EeePC’s and MacBook Air laptops that don’t have integrated optical drives and are therefore much smaller and more portable, this Armada M300 subnotebook without the docking station (and therefore without optical and disk drives) is also stunningly slim and much lighter than my MacBook Pro! Obviously it’s more underpowered than the Air, but for a machine I can slip into my bag and just use in coffee shops for email, light web browsing and updating Twitter and this weblog, it looks just right.

I can see though I’ll be very tempted to upgrade a lot of things with this machine, but I’ll try to resist! Perhaps a brand new 7200RPM 200GB hard disk to increase performace… oh and a glossy screen protector… and a nice new Crumpler bag to put it in… and some FreeBSD stickers for the lid… and a keyboard protector… oh and a nice little black aluminium cooling pad…

And something else? In the bag it came in, there’s a licenced, retail copy of Windows 2000 Professional. I know OEM versions are tied to the machine you bought it with (how do you spell corruption?) but this retail version will let me install it on another machine. With copies of 2000 harder and harder to find thesedays now that Blista and XP are out, this is reassuring, even if I don’t end up using it.