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Linux:
Choosing an Alternative Mobile Operating System
There has never been a better time to select a mobile personal computer. From zero-compromise 7-pound laptops as powerful as a desktop computer, to elegant 4-pound thin-light notebooks with their media docks, to 2-pound ultraportables with their durable magnesium shells and even touchscreens, your choices are outstanding. And prices have never been better.
The hardware choices are excellent, but when it comes to an operating system, you get either Windows 98 for an Intel-based system or Apple's Mac OS if you buy a PowerBook. For the majority of users, these two options are certainly adequate, but some may seek something stronger and more reliable, something cheaper, or something that is just plain more interesting to use. For these people, there is Linux and Be OS. If you feel more comfortable buying Microsoft, there is Windows NT 4 and the upcoming Windows 2000, formerly known as NT 5.
Before we get started down this road, I'd like to make one thing clear: Unix-based environments are not for wimps. I consider myself an experienced, computer savvy fellow and I am just barely qualified to handle this stuff. You should only consider getting into this alternative OS stuff because:
Why can't I mention it? Because when I requested it from the manufacturer I told them I was going to be testing a variety of alternative operating systems on it. They were happy to provide me the machine, they said, but did not want to appear to endorse anything but Windows 98 on this machine. They were concerned that (a) it might violate their contracts with Microsoft, (b) it could pose a huge support problem, and (c) many Linux users are now demanding a refund for the portion of their notebook price equal to the cost of one Windows CPU license since they no longer use that operating system.
Fair enough. I agreed to their request, of course, then used their magnificent machine for all my testing. It performed very well, which is indicative of the kind of experience you can expect using a current midrange notebook equipped with:
I also used the unnamed company's media expander module, which contained an additional battery bay and a media bay with either a CD-ROM or a floppy drive mechanism. All the above are pretty standard notebook specs these days. It would be difficult to buy one without these specs, or very similar ones.
Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 The first problem I ran into was with the video card options. Caldera did a pretty good job of detecting the properties of my test machine's video system, but missed the important fact that my system has 2MB of VRAM instead of the default 512K. I entered this info in the appropriate box, then the next screen offered me a confusing variety of video resolutions, color depths, and refresh rates. Fortunately, the dangerous selections were all unavailable; they were merely listed. I picked a 1024x768 option at a reasonable 64K colors at a refresh rate of 70MHz. To my surprise, it worked.
Problem number two involved getting sound. The thing wouldn't even beep, let alone play music or even WAV files. The solution required me to restart the machine and go into BIOS setup. Somehow, the sound support has disabled itself, probably during the initial installation process. I enabled it and it beeped when I booted the OS, but still no sound beyond that. So I went into Caldera's handy COAS (Caldera Open Administration System) which has a big button right on the task bar. I chose Kernel, then selected the "sb" option to add SoundBlaster support as a loadable driver module. It balked the first time, but I tried a gain and it worked, which Caldera's support page told me would happen. After that my sound worked fine. I even installed an MP3 player and downloaded a bunch of classical guitar pieces to soothe my soul.
The third problem I overcame was getting the modem to work. Because the built-in modem on my notebook is dependent on Windows to do the DSP work, I had to abandon it in favor of a generic PC Card modem, which worked fine after a little trial and error searching for the correct serial IRQ it used.
The resulting environment, using the default KDE desktop, looked pretty good. There was no included TrueType font support so all fonts bigger than 12 points looked terrible, but that can surely be fixed with the right software to support TrueType scalable fonts. I was able to install the included StarOffice suite, which professes to be compatible with Microsoft Office 97, without too much trouble.
Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 was far easier to install on my notebook than Red Hat Linux 6.0, as you will see in the next section.
Red Hat Linux 6.0 Red Hat Linux installs, by default, the elegant Gnome graphical shell over the standard X Window server. Though I preferred the look of it, the KDE graphical interface used by Caldera felt much faster and a bit more configurable. You can always change these interface shells around if you wish, but to do so risks the stability of the system. Red Hat and Caldera both develop specific utilities for their shell environments that really simplify things. As near as I could tell, these utilities ran only on the default shell chosen by each company.
In my testing, Red Hat Linux was fussy and a bit slow. It took the better part of a day to install on my notebook, and even after extensive tweaking I was unable to get either the Ethernet card or SoundBlaster-compatible sound to work. It would beep, but that's all to would do.
The Red Hat installation was far less intelligent than Caldera's, with its endless questions about this and that. I am sure one could get a Red Hat install functioning happily on a notebook if one wanted to spend a lot of time on it. Our network administrator got Red Hat running on his two year old Micron notebook without a hitch, but he doesn't care if the sound doesn't work or the fonts look terrible. He just wants his Linux to go and doesn't seem to care about the little things that mean so much to me. For my money, I'd choose Caldera.
SuSE Linux 6.1 SuSE promises extensive support for mobile machines, and I'm sure they are telling the truth. However, I could not find out how to do simple things like incorporate APM (advanced power management) into the kernel, though some modules that depend on it being there did install, and complained loudly at every opportunity. When I finally gave up and tried to install Windows NT 4.0, the LILO (Linux Loader) from SuSE would not let me do it. I had to track down an old MS-DOS disk and run FDISK /MBR to clear out the little spoilsport program.
If you are a certified Linux guru in training, this is the package to buy. It has so much stuff that you could immerse yourself in it for a week. For the rest of us, just buy Caldera's version and be done with it.
Be OS 4.5 for Intel The company does not officially recommend their OS for portable computers, though internally they have many users on notebooks from various makers. I was really looking forward to installing the latest version (4.5) since I have admired this product since it was in version 0.8 several years ago. I regret to say I was disappointed with the results.
Be OS installs direct from a CD without a hitch, offering to co-exist with Windows or Linux partitions on Intel hardware, or if you use Mac Power PC hardware it can do the same with your existing Mac OS partitions. Unfortunately, Be does not support the latest Power PC 750 (a.k.a. G3) hardware from Apple. It does, however, positively fly on older PowerMacs, and is a tempting way to extend the life of an older Mac.
Once installed, configuration is a simple matter of choosing the appropriate control panel from the main Be menu. After almost a day of fighting with the beast, though, I was unable to get either sound or my Ethernet connection working reliably. Be support was very helpful and spent a lot of time with me, but it looks like the OS itself is just not ready for mobile use. I cannot recommend it until they remedy some of these fundamental mobile issues.
Speaking of Macintosh, things look pretty rosy for Apple's PowerPC-based machines such as my PowerBook G3: the new Unix-based Mac OSX will arrive this year, and is sure to be an attractive alternative to the aging Mac OS.
Conclusion For just about any mobile PC, you have alternatives beyond the one-size-fits-all consumer offerings from Microsoft and Apple when it comes to the mobile operating system you install. They are generally inexpensive if not free, fun to use once you get them installed, and are a great way to show your friends and associates how cool you are. Nothing proclaims your technical independence quite as much as using an uncommon OS.
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