[lug] Laptops and Linux

[Elyse M. Grasso]

The way things are going, people don't want me near any of their
hardware on saturday....
Part 1
My laptop mangled its harddrive over the weekend. Again. And the floppy
drive controller reports errors on powerup about 3/4 of the time. Even
though I have an extended warranty on it, I may decide this one is a
lemon and look into getting a new one.

Question: what laptop models have people found that 1. work well with
Linux, 2. don't die constantly, 3. don't have one of those
eraser-pointer things?

Part 2
I pulled my old laptop out of the closet. (IBM PS2 LX40: 386sx-20, 1 Meg
Ram, floppy, 84 Meg hard drive, monochrome VGA screen,14.400 modem,
serial port, parallel port). Solid IBM construction. I used to run OS/2
2.x on it, but it's a Win 3.1 box now... even OS/2 outgrew it.
It actually makes a good dedicated Word Processing box, but it would be
nice if it could talk to my other machines without tying up both of my
phone lines to use the modem to dial in. Does anyone have any ideas
about the best way to set up communications across a Null Modem line?
(There used to be a NULL modem cable in my computer room. Somewhere...
Of course, I don't think it's labeled. )

Thanks

Elyse Grasso