Hi Folks,
	
	Since the responses are now down to a trickle I've culled
    together what I've been able to find out about NetBSD on laptops and
    put it into loosely organized file.  I have included that file
    below.  All who responded are given credit at the top.

Thanks,
George


This is a brief file detailing the responses I got to a query about
people running NetBSD on laptops.

Responses were received from:
lma@fintronic.com (Larry M. Augustin)
Havard Eidnes <Havard.Eidnes@runit.sintef.no>
David Carrel <carrel@cisco.com>
Takahiro Kanbe <taka@fxis.fujixerox.co.jp>
"Charles M. Hannum" <mycroft@ai.mit.edu>
"Steven J. Dovich" <dovich@p400.sequoia.com>
"Marc W. Mengel" <mengel@dcdmwm.fnal.gov>
"Alex R.N. Wetmore" <aw2t+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Takahiro Kanbe <taka@fxis.fujixerox.co.jp>
tnguyen@cup.hp.com (Thinh Nguyen)

1) Machines

The Dell Latitude XP series has performed fine for me. I haven't got
around to installing/integrating/writing drivers for the PCMCIA slots
or for the Future Domain SCSI-2 controller available on the optional
port replicator. The 10baseT ethernet device on the port replicator
appeared to be recognized by the generic kernel, though I haven't yet
done any thing with that either.

I've setup and used NetBSD 1.0 on a NEC Versa SL (I think thats the
model, i can find out for sure if you like).  Works great.  I've also run 
it on a ThinkPad 750, which was a lot harder to get setup initially (it has
some weird power management that takes the top 4k of base memory, so
you have to tell bsd to pretend that the machine has 4k less then it
say it has).  I also had to make some patches to the boot blocks to boot
from 2.88 meg drives.  I can make these available if you want.

I recently bought a Gateway 2000 Liberty laptop and I run NetBSD on it
and love it.  It's a 100MHz DX4 with a 720 Meg Drive, 24 Meg of memory, a
10.4 inch color screen (not active) and it weighs 4.2 lbs.  I had to hack the
kernel a bit to get it to work, but it now works.  (I had to hack the wd
driver an the pms driver.)  I still need to get PCMCIA support working
and real APM support working.

I run NetBSD 1.0 on Chaplet's iLuFa350(It might be diffrent name in
US).  It's a 75MHz DX4 with 360 Meg Drive, 12 Meg of memory, DSTN
color, A5 size and it weights 4.0 lbs.  I did't need any hacking.
But without AC-line, it freezed when probing floppy drive.

The Compaq Contura 3/25, which is not a current model, worked great for
me for quite a while.  I had one with 8/120 and I could compile the
kernel during my train commute if I liked.  Of course my commute was 2
hours :-)

I've been told that the ThinkPad 360 works well for a NetBSD latop.

2) Gotchas

PCMCIA Floppy drives -- nobody has drivers for the PCMCIA
floppy controllers, you'll have a devil of a time installing
the system, backing it up, etc. (FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux,
none of 'em).

Some of the trackballs don't work well with *BSD drivers,
The TwinHead (aka CompuDyne, old Radio Shack laptops)
had a particular problem with that.

Make sure you can expand to enough memory for X, if
that's what you want to run.

Either turn off syncd, or back it *way* off, so you don't
waste power keeping the disk spun up all the time.

On the Gateway 2000 you can't install from the 1.0 floppies 
because the 1.0 wd driver won't work at all.  But a floppy with the
kernel is available.