krauskopf

i posted something similar on a couple of forums, but this time i forgot to mention: i'm looking to buy a used laptop, old, and sub-$500.

there's lots of sites dedicated to giving linux help to existing laptop owners, but i'm backwards. i'm looking to buy a laptop, and i'm looking for one that will have good linux hardware support. the biggest question is this: what mobile video chips have hardware accelerated linux drivers? ati and nvidia, i know, any others? i wanna buy an older laptop, probably pre-geforce20go linux certified (http://www.linuxcertified.com/) sells a model for $500, but i'm not looking for anything pre-installed or with a warranty, or probably even that new. well, maybe about those specs. Quote: IBM Thinkpad 600 [Refurbished] - LCTP2 Intel Pentium II/400 MHz 160 MB ram 10.0 GB 13.3" Active Color (1024x768) 24x internal CD-ROM PCMCIA Ethernet Card Internal 56k Pre-loaded Red Hat Linux. Custom install with both GNOME and KDE desktop environments. Linux distribution included. Warranty: 45 days. Upgradable. i'd likely be ebaying for said laptop. back to the main question, are there any video chipsets of this age with available hareware-accelerated linux drivers? i don't even know when ati hopped in the mobile market, perhaps they had one. thanks. -john

linux can do this, but i doubt that clustering is what you want. clustering is used to distribute processing. many distrobutions of linux install apache, the super-awesome open source webserver, by default. using this, video4linux, and a webcam program, any of the machines (assuming compatibility with webcam... usually pretty good) can serve webcam images. as for music, i guess you want to take storage from each of them and make one big virtual drive. this may be a little tricky. it wouldn't be too hard to have a few seperate storage volumes, one for each machine. for example, on your wireless device, you could have mounted (NFS or Samba or something else) : /mnt/mp3a /mnt/mp3b /mnt/mp3c and then web browse your way over to http://192.168.0.3/webcam http://192.168.0.4/webcam http://192.168.0.5/webcam or you could even have one sort of 'main' computer, and mount the others from it. /mnt/mp3/a /mnt/mp3/b /mnt/mp3/c and http://192.168.0.2/webcam1 http://192.168.0.2/webcam2 http://192.168.0.2/webcam3 and you could even have all three (or more) images show up on one page i know that linux can span hard drives into one big volume, and i would expect that through the same means you could span network mounts, but i have no experience here. -john