On 25.03.02, 11:59:13, Andrew Diller wrote:
> 
> You absolutely need the high-cap battery. Since the z50 won't suspend, 
> you're stuck with the screen sucking down juice (i keep x going on mine) 
> all the time. With a fully charged hicap battery, X and the microdrive, I 
> still get about 6-8 hours before I have to recharge. Way better than any pc 
> latop that I have.
> 
> The Microdrive makes some clicking noises, but other than that is very 
> quiet.

With the display dimmed a bit (brightness two notches above minimum)
before the kernel boots and a 128M CF card I get about 6--7 hours with
the normal battery. I have looked at some specs and the newer (more
efficient) IBM Microdrives use about 20mA in standby, whereas a
typical CF card only uses 0.2mA. When reading/writing, the MD uses
about 250--300mA, and the CF around 60--70mA.

At the moment I only have 16 MB, so I must have a swap partition on
the CF card (which might shorten its life somewhat). I'm not sure how
much more main memory will affect battery life. Since not much is
running on the machine, even with 16MB it hardly ever uses swap.

As to the need to pkgsrc/compiler/etc., I have only a very minimal
setup on the CF card (basically only a kernel, base.tgz, etc.tgz,
xfont.tgz and the Xserver.) and use it as an X-Terminal. The only
daemon running is sshdd. I start the Xserver with "-indirect boa", boa
being my main workstation, so that I get a host chooser and can get an
X-session on any of my other machines.

If I need to build something, I nfs-mount a complete /usr, and
union-mount it _under_ (-b option) the existing /usr. That way I have
the compiler and all the tools I need. I then nfs-mount /usr/pkgsrc
and/or /usr/src and build away. If packages are installed in /usr/pkg,
they get installed on the local filesystem on the CF card, sinst that
is mounted _above_ the complementary /usr on the nfs. Works really
fine.

Afte I'm done, I can unmount the additional /usr (might have to use -f
and restart some daemons afterwards) and have the small core system
again.

If disk space gets really tight, have a look at gzexe(1), it can save
several MB, if used right. Beware though, that not all programs work
well when compressed, so don't crunch whole directories
automatically. I did that once and had to re-install from scratch.

Too bad IBM didn't release a successor with a slightly larger display,
but still, they made a _very_ neat machine with the z50. And the
NetBSD/hpcmips kernel hackers did a marvellous job to bring a real OS
to it.

On a related note, the NetBSD/hpcmips page has a link to an audio
driver for the VR4121, but the page seems to be gone. Anyone know what
happened to that audio driver?


Have fun,

Bernd
> 
> -andy diller
> 

-- 
Bernd Sieker

NetBSD: Designed to be {secure, reliable, portable, CORRECT}
		-- Matthew Orgass