I recently purchased a Compaq Evo N200 to run Linux.
General impressions: It’s a nice laptop, personally I love the form factor. I’m waiting until I get a little more experence with it until I judge it as a Linux laptop. (Update: after a few months, I gave this machine up due to power management problems.)
Pros:
- light weight (about 2.5 pounds) and small size
Cons:
- the built-in modem is a Winmodem
- have to pay for Windows
- power management basically doesn’t work under Linux
Things to consider:
- the keyboard is “80%” size. It’s actually 95% width, but they’ve shrunk the height. I got used to it without trouble, but you may not.
- the screen is 10.4” diagonal. For me, it’s a good size/weight trade-off, but YMMV.
Machine stats for the N200: Pentium-II 700MHz, 192MB RAM (supposedly not expandable), 20GB disk (I replaced it with a 30GB Toshiba MK3017GAP without trouble), ATI Rage Mobility, audio is an Intel 82440MX AC’97, internal Winmodem (Lucent–Redhat says unknown device 11c1:045c), internal Ethernet is a generic tulip. BIOS TBD
Disclaimer: PC models change very quickly, what’s on this page may not have bearing on later models. YMMV.
Linux
Installation: I haven’t installed linux, but the machine booted RedHat Linux 7.2 from a 30GB hard disk I’d installed on a different machine. My expectation is that installation with the CD-ROM on the mobile expansion unit would be straightforward.
I upgraded Redhat 7.2 to 7.3 via the Mobile Expansion Unit’s CD-ROM. The upgrade worked flawlessly (although somewhat slowly).
RedHat 7.2 and 7.3 autoconfigures the video, audio, USB, and touchpad without problem.
Power management: I had a lot of trouble with suspend/resume, and have basically given up on it. See the details on their own web page.
The modem is a “win”modem. I tried the ltmodem-.6.00c2 drivers. They build and install fine, and the modem responds to AT commands, but when I try dialing a number it complains “NO DAILTONE”.
Another user (and a list of other params) suggested that the work-around to this problem is to explicitly set the modem’s ports and IRQs with the load option “Forced=3,0x108,0x2e8” or something similar. Not yet tried.
FreeBSD
I don’t have any news about FreeBSD on this machine yet.