kelly felkins wrote:
> Andy,
> 
> I'm new to this and working and experiencing some of the things you are
> asking about.
> 
> I have a mobilepro 780. I've installed netbsd on it using a microdrive.
> See below for the few answers or comments I can provide
> 
> 
>>I'm looking for a HPC device to generally play with. It needs to run
>>X
>>so I can play some games, possibly use a graphical browser, etc.



> I've been able to start X but so far it is not very useful. The 780 has
> a half vga screen 640x240, I think. This is not much for X. I'm looking
> for ways to make this usable. I need a window manager with the
> following features:
>    * minimal decorations and icons - need all of the pixels available
> for the applications
>    * since there will be few decorations and icons I need key board
> commands to do things like selecting the next window, maximizing a
> window, etc. 

  There are several available. Fluxbox, Blackbox, Ratpoison, and others.
Try one, see how it is, then try another. Fluxbox has pretty  good 
support for most operations, like switching windows, switching 
workspaces, moving windows, etc. However, considering the size and power 
of machine, you may have to adjust your definition of 'usable'. Things 
like the memory and disk speed make quite a difference than a generic 
laptop or PC.

I don't suppose you've tried a recent graphical browser (on any 
operating system) with a 133mhz or so processor. Even if you're 
extremely patient, you'll find it's very unusable. Additionally, the 
speed However, for games, I play Nethack on my mobile pro 770 all the 
time, with no problems (except for some keyboard ergonomics)

> I have not been able to install a browser. So far there seems to be
> dependencies that prevent the browser from installing. I can't even
> install lynx yet!

I use the packages, and have no problem. While I haven't installed lynx 
specifically, I prefer the text browser w3m.

>>And
>>I'd like to use a large CF card to store data or put the NetBSD
>>filesystems.
> 
> 
> I have a 4GB microdrive. It works fine for this. Lots of room for the
> NetBSD packages. 

You've got it easy. I'm still on a 192Mb compact flash card. :P

>>I'd like to use a wireless ethernet adapter for my house
>>and when I go somewhere with a hotspot. I want it to boot and run
>>reliably.
> 
> 
> I have a netgear something 401 card. It works great. The only problem
> is that if I remove the card I must reboot to reenable it. I suspect
> there is something simple I can do but haven't discovered it yet.

So the card isn't recognized after re-inserting it? It's not in 
`ifconfig -a`? I would respectfully suggest powering off the card while 
it's still inserted `ifconfig wi0 down` if this is the case.

>>Is there any specific advantage to getting the 880 over the 800 other
>>than CPU power?
> 
> 
> I don't know about these specific models. I think one of these is the
> full vga version of the mobilepro 780 that I have.
> 
> 
>>Also, if I install NetBSD, what is involved in recovering the CE
>>operating system? I read about a hard reset button that supposedly
>>will re-install the base system. Will this still work after
>>installing
>>NetBSD?


> The CE operating system is in ROM and can be booted by pressing the
> reset button on the bottom of the device. You can later boot netbsd via
> the netbsd bootloader, which is a windows ce application. On the
> surface this sounds like you can have a dual boot system...
> 
> However, there are some significant gotchas that basically disable CE.
> When booting, netbsd takes all the memory for the device. When you
> reset to get back to CE there is nothing from the CE environment
> remaining, except things that are on a CF card. I would like to save
> the contacts, calendar, etc information on the cf card so that I can
> access that information from CE, but I have not found a way to do this.
> CE becomes the bootloader for netbsd.

Yes, this is a problem. You could do one of three things: either keep an 
additional hpcmips handheld for your Windows CE work. Or you could just 
remember to activesync or whatever often enough, so that the palmtop 
will be restored after you're done with NetBSD. Or you could keep 
contacts and calendar using unix tools (vi, cal, calendar, etc) and 
avoid returning to CE ever. If your dos partition is large enough on 
your CF, you could remember to copy them out of ram onto CF, and back 
into ram after you're done with NetBSD. But I'm not sure, I haven't 
tried it.