OS	CPU	RAM	Drives	IPv4 Addresses	IPv6 Addresses	Aliases
Linux 2.4.18	Intel Pentium 166 MMX	144MB	5.1GB IDE	10.0.0.16 (802.11b)	fec0::10 (802.11b)

faye is a Compaq Armada 7750MT laptop that I acquired courtesy of Sertrel. I got her stripped... she came with a docking station, but all the removable media drives had been pulled, along with the battery, and the hard drive was wiped clean. This meant that the machine could not be booted. Further, because she lacked the Compaq diagnostics partition, there was no way to reconfigure the BIOS.

I got a 2.5"->3.5" IDE adapter that let me put faye's hard drive into a desktop box and installed Slackware on it that way. Initially, she refused to boot after I put the drive back in her - she would get to "LI" and stop - but after I added "lba32" to her lilo.conf, it worked and I was able to boot into Linux.

Amazingly enough, as far as I've been able to determine, all of faye's hardware is supported in Linux. The video is an S3 Aurora V64+ that runs at 1024x768x16bpp. It's not supported in the XFree86 4.1.0 that Slack 8 ships with - it basically worked, but there was some weirdness with the top centimeter or so of the screen. XFree86 4.2.0 fully supports it, though, so after a ten-hour download and seven-hour compile, faye has working video. It uses the VESA video driver... the S3 "accelerated" driver also works, but only in supercrappy resolution, and it's slower than the VESA driver.

The sound, an ESS ES1878 AudioDrive, works, after reconfiguring ISA PnP to allocate IRQs properly.

There's an Ethernet port in the docking station - a TI ThunderLAN, which uses the tlan.o driver. The laptop itself does not appear to have built-in Ethernet, though. There's what looks like a dongle attachment on the side, which I haven't yet been able to determine the purpose of, but it won't load the tlan driver if the machine's not in the docking station, so if it's for Ethernet, it's apparently not a ThunderLAN.

I've added a PCMCIA Linksys WPC11 802.11b wireless card, which works nicely, and provides a couple hundred meters of roaming range.

The laptop does have dial-up built in - a 33.6k modem on ttyS1 (COM2). It's a standard Hayes-compatible serial modem that works fine under Linux.

It appears to load IrCOMM drivers, though I have nothing to test the IR port with, so I'm not sure if it's actually working.

I maxed out the RAM shortly after acquiring her. She came with 40MB loaded, 16MB on the board and a 16MB and an 8MB SODIMM. $40 at Crucial got me a pair of 64MB SODIMMs, the largest she can take, which brings her to 144MB, with the 16MB onboard. The RAM goes a long way towards making up for her relatively slow processor. She can run X, Mozilla, GIMP, PostgreSQL, Apache + PHP, and so on, simultaneously, and with quite usable, if not blindingly fast, performance.