← Back to context

Comment by Tepix

10 hours ago

I had a pretty slick Toshiba Libretto L1 from Japan at the time - twice as wide as long, with a 1280x600 display.

Its 600Mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU was pretty slow, unfortunately. Like a Celeron 333Mhz IIRC.

I used a Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046 laptop at university. It had an 800Mhz Crusoe chip. IIRC it shipped with 256 MB of RAM, which I eventually upgraded to 384.

Somehow I managed to tolerate running Gentoo on it. Compiling X, OpenOffice, or Firefox were multi-day affairs. One thing that annoyed me was I could never get the graphics card (an ATI Rage 128 with 4 MB RAM, IIRC) working with acceleration under Linux, and that was when compositing window managers were gaining prevalence; I kept trying to get it working in the hope that it would take a bit of the load off of the struggling CPU.

Despite the bad performance, it worked really well for a college student: it was great for taking notes, and the batteries (extended main and optical drive bay) would easily last a full day of classes. It wouldn't run Eclipse very well, but most of my CS assignments were done using a text editor, anyways.