I call it the $0 Laptop, because that's what I paid for it. The dead Gateway Solo 1450 I got a few months back now runs.

The Gateway's previous owner abandoned it because its DC power plug pretty much disintegrated -- a common problem in these machines because the plug in question is a PC-board-mounted piece of plastic.

I spent all of $2 to get a 1/4-inch, 2.1mm DC power plug. After removing about 20 screws, I still couldn't get the case all the way apart, so I propped it open, soldered wires to what was left of the original power plug (two twisted metal pieces and one trace atop the PC board), pulled out a "knock-out" panel over a convenient 1/4-inch hole in the case, wired up the plug and screwed the whole damn thing together. I had a hard drive ready. (Months ago, I pulled the original and gave it back to its owner.)

So now I have experience with the Gateway and the older $15 Laptop, a Compaq Armada 7770DMT.

It's night and friggin' day. While the Compaq is much, much slower than the Gateway, from a design and construction standpoint, the Compaq is better in every way.

But the Gateway was free. So I decided to try to get some Linux and BSD distros on it.

Xubuntu 7.04 had a promising start. After booting the live CD, I even had the panels that went missing in my other installs. But the install crashed, and on subsequent tries, those panels disappeared, so I decided to move on. I tried the Ubuntu alternate-install disc and got stopped by debootstrap errors. It's a problem I've had before. I could've used my tried-and-true method -- install Xubuntu 6.10 and upgrade to 7.04 with Update Manager -- but I decided to move forward.

I figured I'd try a BSD. I put Desktop BSD in and got further than ever before -- all the way to the graphical install sequence. Except instead of letters making up words, I had little boxes ... and couldn't tell what to do next.

I should've tried PC-BSD, but I was ready to move on.

I installed Vector Standard. All looked good. I couldn't wait to get Fluxbox on it and see what it was really made of. But when trying to run Vector, the display blanked. No X. If I could somehow figure out how to start in a console, I could've probably hacked Xorg.conf, but I couldn't figure that out.

Even Puppy blanked out. No X. A machine that can't boot Puppy? What the hell. It turns out that Caitlyn Martin of O'Reilly has this same problem.

So I tried Zenwalk 4.6.1. A perfect install. Runs great.

There's one problem. It's a Gateway Solo 1450 problem, not a Linux problem (though Linux could be better about fixing it). Just tapping on the Alps touchpad generates a left mouse click. It's great if you're a very disciplined touchpad user, but nobody's that disciplined. Just about every time I moused over anything, it opened up. Pain in the ass.

I did a bit of Googling. The Synaptics touchpad suggestion of putting this in xorg.conf didn't work:

Option "MaxTapTime" "0"

Again, this DIDN'T work. And the first time through, I had a typo in the word "Option" and killed X. Knoppix wouldn't let me edit xorg.conf, Puppy (as I said) didn't work, but the Ubuntu live CD did, and I fixed xorg.conf. I had X, but the damn touchpad remains touchy.

Also, by default the fan runs all the time. I Googled, again, and saw all sorts of cron jobs and other machinations for getting some kind of sane laptop power management. Guess I need Klaptop or something -- maybe even GNOME. Who the hell knows?

If Linux can't get power management for laptops right, we've got a huge, looming problem.

My first hunch was to install Debian or Slackware. And I just might do that tomorrow. I set up the partitions to have 1 GB of swap, 10 GB for / and the remaining 19 GB or so for /home. That way, if I ever actually use this laptop, I can keep /home intact while changing Linux distros at will. At least that's the theory.

So tomorrow it's either the previously mentioned Debian or Slackware, or perhaps Ubuntu/Xubuntu 6.06.

I'm still mourning the fact that it can't/won't run Puppy.