Been working on a Portege 2000 Laptop. Started by pulling the hard drive completely out. This reduces noise of course as well as battery life. The problem was, what are you left with. A laptop that will only boot to the bios. To install an operating system is already difficult enough on a Portege 2000 as the laptop comes with no cd-rom drive or any other internal drive. It is equipped with an SD card slot though. Like what camera's and cellphones use to store ringtones etc. The goal was to make an SD card my hard drive. This would allow awesome battery life as well as NO MOVING PARTS. No spinning hard drive, no noise, and hopefully a fast read write speed to the flash memory.
I had previously booted pendrive linux from a network via PXE and TTFTP on the same laptop, so I knew it could be done. The pendrive linux was booted via PXE over a network as the portege has no bios settings for usb boot or even supports for external cd-rom drive or floppy drive. The problem was pendrive linux nor dsl linux could properly install due to no hard drive storage. I could trick them into running though. Those distros need something to copy to.
After playing with a 4 gig CF card and 1.8" to CF adapter, I could get the bios to recognize the CF, but not able to install to it. I partitioned to FAT,FAT32,and then NTFS with no avail. Still was not able to install to the disk. I gave up on that idea and moved to the forgotten SD card. I had a 128mb a 512mb and a 2 gig stick to play with.
The hard part was making the SD bootable. After multiple tries, I managed to install EEEUbuntu on the 2 gig SD card, setting aside the extra 1200mb or so for the persistant drive. This allows you to save stuff to the drive. Got it bootable via DOSOSOAR and an executable .bat file. The Portege does not support booting via usb so I had to PXE boot from a network and load a plbt boot file or (GRUB) to allow various boot options. I plugged in the network cable, started the ttftp server, set the portege to boot via usb and she fired up. Load time on the Ubuntu was a little slow. The SD card speeds are not up to say a 7200 rpm hard drive but I have no moving parts. To top that off I can remove the SD Card, put it in my pocket, take it to any other computer and boot my stuff on it. This make the portege a paperweight. Without a hard drive, and SD card in my pocket, the laptop is useless to a theif. I have all my info in my pocket, they have a useless piece of metal.
After configuring Ubuntu speeds started increasing. I still have caching on the SD set up so I dont expect the actual life of the card to last long. You would really need support for UDMA to increase life on the read write side. The principle is there though. I am working on making the display through xrandr scripts and manipulating the /etc/x11/xorg.conf file to set the display to 1024x768_60.00 for some reason the ubuntu default must be 800x600_59
I have started by adding the new mode with this string #!xrandr --newmode "1024x768_60.00" etc. etc. etc. <--(diff modes)but have been unsuccessful due to the permissions. Ubuntu has something screwy with the root logon and allowing permission to edit some files. The #!chmod 755 /etc/x11/xorg.conf still will not allow me to get access.
Overall, the whole process has been fun. Other than the display problems, ubuntu is a great distro. It supported my audio, mouse, etc. and even recognized the usb wifi adapter right off. Still running tests on the battery life and possibly making the SD a little faster. I have read multiple forums stating that a computer cannot boot nor run from SD. It is the same principle as booting from usb, just with a twist. SUPERGEEK 5000 OUT!
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