RE: z50 for everyday life?

Speaking frankly, I think that NetBSD on the z50 is good (and quite fun) to tinker with, but its "everyday" use is a bit more limited. Xhpc works, but is slow, and the suspend routine is buggy and will crash your machine about 10% of the time. Compiling packages is painfully, painfully slow (we're talking days here), unless you have another machine you can set up with distcc to take the bulk of the cpu load, but even then we're still talking days, just fewer days.

I have also run into instances where I completely lose keyboard/mouse focus functionality. I've never figured out why that is (window focus gets messed up). I usually have to do a re-install and restore from backup to get things back to normal, and this also takes hours to do.

I've had success with a 16-bit WPC11 card. 32 bit cardbus cards do not work. Period. Also, be careful, certain revisions of the DWL-650 don't work. In any case, do a google search if you've narrowed down to a card, and 

Now, if I haven't scared you off yet, I do have mine working with centerim for IM, elinks/links-gui/dillo for web browsing, and Ted for basic word processing. The blackbox window manager runs quite well on it, and there aren't too many dependencies to have to compile and install. It's very cute, and I like the fact that old hardware like this can still be used with a modern OS. You just have to understand that it's not going to be user-friendly, and you'll have to devote lots of time to get things up and running. But I guess that's where half the fun lies, since I've learned quite a bit working with NetBSD and the z50. Just consider yourself warned going in, though.


Khoa Tran
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