I know, sounds insane right? Who would want to do that!

Well, I'm insane, why not? I'm willing to bash my head against this until I have a laptop or a desktop that runs Icaros Natively with good driver support, wifi, and all that gab.

I would like to do a laptop. I mod laptops all the time, my current prize being an Asus G50VT-X5, because they are easy to hack and add things to whenever you want (much like an amiga imo). I have 3 plops of compatible laptops:

Dell Inspiron 1000: A Celeron lappy that is good as a demo unit. Everything works! But no wifi.... Not acceptable.

HP\Compaq NW8000: A Pentium M machine that is my prized possession. Its useable up to audio and sometimes the GPU drivers break. No wifi either D:

Asus G50V: Most things work, most of the time, and wifi is super easy to add. Nvidia 9800 will even do everything an amiga would be capable of, I think.

What my over all goal is is to have a laptop that boots and runs icaros and is stable. I want it to be able to go on the net because I was playing with the new 2.2.0 release earlier today in VirtualBox and what I consider basic online tasks (youtube, twitter, newgrounds forums, gmail) were all going perfect.

I have wireless cards available, but the definition of "Atheros 5000 series Wifi Cards" is uhhh.... Loose? Undefined to me. Theres a couple of 5000 series wifi cards. Can I use an AR5B95? Can I use a 5X 5B or 5C?

"Well, but what do you want to do you insane person?"

Above I listed my basic online tasks, IRC, emulators, and writing. This is all that I really use a PC for and when I go back to school I want something that people won't want to touch. My security in high school was that I used (and still use) linux, and didn't hide it either. If someone sees some ancient or weird looking OS, my findings have been that they don't touch your stuff if they know what it is.

So does anyone have anyone have some suggestions of hardware to look into? Where would I look towards for basic user stuff? (theming, apps [I know aros-exec], other forums?)

Thanks :3

@dommer416

Quote:

other forums?)

You may try amiga.org (has similar demographics as AW) or eab.abime.net (more classic oriented).

@dommer416

Definitely doable - I have four machines (soon to be five) which only boot AROS (two desktops, a Compaq laptop and a Samsung netbook). The Samsung is my machine for work, the laptop my general home browsing/creating machine, the one desktop for 3D gaming and email and the other is an ancient pentium just for experimentation (as its burnt out USB will testify...) The fifth is to be a home control/media server machine. By comparison we have one Windows machine, a laptop, which gets booted by me, well, almost never. So AROS, depending on your partciular needs of course, is perfectly usable as a 'daily drive'.

In terms of WiFi, I'd agree the naming of some of the Atheros cards is not the clearest in terms of identifying their chipset. An alternative is a Netgear WG111v3 USB WiFi dongle; cheaply available on ebay (I just got a spare for £4 with postage) and works really well.

For writing, a simple text editor included Icaros is NoWinEd, which is great for bashing out text but has no formatting features or anything like that. Cinnamon Writer is also in there, but I've never found it to be very stable. Until the new FinalWriter makes an appearance, the best bet is to fire up the Janus emulator and use some classic software; my personal preference is my old copy of Pagestream 4.0. Another alternative is through Google docs or MS Office online.

To be honest, Paolone has done all of the hard work and included all of the good native software for AROS in Icaros, it's just a case of browsing through and seeing what you like the look of. And yes, any issues that come up would be best brought to AROS-exec; people there are always very supportive.

Cheers,
Nigel.

@dommer416

I have an Acer Aspire One A150 which I consider my "new A1200" (both for the very friendly naming scheme, with all those nice 'A' inside, AND for the simple fact that everything in Icaros works) but I need to set up another more powerful notebook with Icaros Desktop. So any suggestion about a good 1-3 years old notebook being able to run 3D graphics, wi-fi,. ethernet and audio is very welcome!

@dommer416

Quote:

So does anyone have anyone have some suggestions of hardware to look into? Where would I look towards for basic user stuff? (theming, apps [I know aros-exec], other forums?)

1.
Try a live version of Icaros ( from CD, DVD or USB Stick this depends on your hardware) this will help you to find the most suitable hardware for AROS.

2.
If they can't help you here, try http://www.aros-exec.org, I think you will get most help there.

@ntromans

!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have a pile of WG111V1/2/3 PCI cards! Hardly a laptop but.... Eh, its a place to start!
Also, for writing I intend to use Abiword as theres a port for it and its what I use for most everything anyways. I'm curious what the compaq lappy is because I have access to one in a scrap pile, a C700 or something like that.

@paolone

haha I actually lost my aros exec login ^.^ I'm the guy working on the net stack and GPU stack.

@dommer416

Sorry - I didn't clock you'd already popped over to the 'exec. My laptop is a HP Compaq nc6320. Everything is supported including 3D graphics (although IntelGMA, nowhere near as powerful or fast as Gforce) except WiFi (hence the usb stick). It does need a special version of HDaudio.device that Neil created, though.

Cheers,
Nigel.