Xorg

Like many laptops, the Compaq nw9440 has a Synaptics touchpad. If you want to scroll like the big boys, which is to say with the right side of the touchpad, then you need to make some changes to your xorg.conf. I also use a USB pointer (Logitech TrackMan Wheel, the second generation Marble) and I wanted to be able to use both at once, either/or, et cetera. The touchpad can supposedly be used pressure-sensitively in The GIMP, which is another possible motivation.

I have a Compaq nw9440 "Mobile Workstation" class system, P/N (or type or something) EZ901#AA. There are a number of different systems called the nw9440 which come in the same case, which are slightly different. I won't go into it here; this isn't an ad for HP. In fact, this laptop has presented (in my opinion) more than its fair share of obstacles in my pursuit of Linux. ACPI is slightly wonky, the modem is from Conexant, and video, of all things, has been a major PITA. This is highly unfortunate because this laptop has quite excellent graphics, in fact carrying the best of breed for its date of release - the NVIDIA Quadro FX1500. In particular, I am able to use the display panel only at its maximum resolution.

Some time ago I managed to pick up an IBM Thinkpad A21p for $200. I was motivated to make the purchase because it has a 1600x1200 15" display, which if you do the math is 133 ppi, an extremely high-resolution display. The display ended up having some lines down the side (display or flexible circuit problem) but all in all the system works quite well. I've since spent another $120 or so adding 256MB RAM (up to 384MB) and the 3Com MiniPCI combo ethernet/modem. The modem will likely never work in Linux, so I also have a Xircom two-slot-height cardbus ethernet/modem card which is supported.

This is a fairly sweet little system for its time, although it's nothing special now. It's got a Mobile Pentium 3 which runs at about 850 MHz and will step down to 700 or so, and really amazingly crap speakers. And the biggest problem? ATI Rage Mobility M3. The display does not properly report resolutions via DDC (Windows manages to figure it out, but that's not saying much since it's special-cased up the yin-yang) and so you get a horribly mangled display.