Linux for Your Laptop

Rating:
Summary: LINUX FOR YOUR LAPTOP, by Bill Ball
Review: Bill Ball's books been a great help to me. I purchased both of the following of his books a couple of years ago:

Sams Teach Yourself Linux in 24 Hours (1st ed. - includes Red Hat 5.0) Que's Using Linux (one copy included with every VA Linux workstation!) and found them very helpful. Thank you, Bill!

I started my adventures with Linux in 1997 with RedHat 4.2 and Slackware 3.0 and 3.1 (LINUX SECRETS and SLACKWARE LINUX UNLEASHED). ...

On 26 October, at a local bookstore, I picked up a copy of Bill Ball's LINUX FOR YOUR LAPTOP, with the included LinuxCare BBC. I'm pleased to say that my Toshiba Satellite Pro 445, with 3C575 NIC, now boots from the BBC, runs X, directly from "startx", no parameters needed. Getting the Toshiba to work with other (floppy-based) boot/root systems had so far been unsuccessful. Bill Ball and LinuxCare have saved me a great deal of time. Many thanks to them for their contributions!

Bill Ball's tips on "Stolen Notebooks" are worth many times the purchase price of LINUX FOR YOUR LAPTOP. Thanks, Bill!

Thanks to Bill Ball and the LinuxCare team, I can now run all of my operational computers, five in all, on my LAN, using my OS of 1st choice, Linux, productively with my OS of 2nd choice, MS Windows 95.

Please keep up your great work, Bill.

Sincerely,

Bill Segraves Auburn, Alabama

P.S. Bill Ball's USING LINUX and TEACH YOURSELF ... were most helpful getting me started a couple of years ago with Netscape and Adobe Acrobat development with the Linux OS at the heart of the (Apache) server systems.

Rating:
Summary: The best reference for Linux on laptops anywhere
Review: I have never owned a book which packed as much good information about a subject between two covers. This book covers everything from what kinds of laptops to consider when making your purchase, to solving some of the most sticky technical issues easily and quickly. IBM and Dell have probably purchased several of these books for their technical staff to use as reference. And if they haven't already, they should. The text is direct and understandable. It is written in plain english, not "computereese". Each chapter ends with no less than 20 or more url's which contain even more information pertaining to the particular subject the chapter was about. The book also contains a "business card" cd for emergency recovery in the back. Very cool. I reccommend anybody with a laptop computer buy this book and keep it in your Targus bag. Even if you use Windows, you never know when you may wish to take steps to turn your laptop into a dependable tool someday, and stop being a "Windows '98 crash dummy". I carry mine with me all the time. BUY IT!!!

Rating:
Summary: Missing essential information
Review: I have purchased the book because I wanted to re-install Linux on my Dell laptop.
There are a few specific areas that should be covered in a good book about Linux laptop:
PCMCIA, Advanced Power Manager, video card issues (especially nVidia), hd tuning, and,
last but not least, hibernation.

The first few issues are mentioned with more or less success. The most important one, the most specific one,
sleep and hibernation, is superficial and insufficient. Bill Ball's advice is: if you got it with your
MS-DOS installed on the disk, there is a hibernation partition and it's better not to touch it.
This is of zero value for someone seeking to install everything.