CTX Easybook 800 Series

This page only has information specific to this laptop. If you haven't come from there, and before Emailing me, please look at the main page for more info and specs.

Richard Miller reported to me that the EasyBook 700e works fine with RH 6.0. Mail him if you have questions.

Good things:

Ability to display the battery charge on screen independently from the OS. It's not a very precise gauge (5 levels or so) and the display depends on the current video mode, but it's still nice.
Video in and out (I somewhat got video out to work under linux, the results will depend on the resolution, and the refresh rates).
Two bays, one for the floppy, one for the CD-Rom. You can put 2 batteries.
The keyboard layout isn't awesome, but it's decent. The right control and alt keys were removed (you need to type Fn+left alt or ctrl). It's not that bad an idea because those keys aren't used that often, and you can still remap the two windows keys if you wish. What you gain is a longer space bar
The internal modem works! (actually, according to some reports I've gotten it may not be true for everyone. I guess they tried to shave a few bucks off, and at least some of those laptops have winmodems).

Bad things:

The first model I got had a deffective CD-Rom
Battery uses a bay, so you need to connect the floppy externally
You get suspend to RAM or suspend to disk, not both at the same time (you need to choose which one you want in the bios)
The sound volume is not a rolling button, it's controlled with an up and down buttons. There is also a mute button, which makes this a little more bearable.
If linux is compiled with APM support it will crash. After talking to the APM maintainer, I am convinced that the BIOS is buggy. Linux will work if compiled without APM.
NOTE: Red Hat 6.0 comes with APM enabled by default, so the install will crash. Try adding apm=off on the lilo command line and if that doesn't work you ought to try RH 5.2 (which has APM disabled in the kernel)
When you hit a key to restore the display after it has blanked, from time to time, shift will apparently get stuck in the keyboard controller. This is not a mecanical problem, it looks like a hardware bug. I haven't found a way to recover from this (outside of rebooting), and for this reason, I don't recommend buying this laptop (what a shame, it's rather nice otherwise). Maybe someone will find a fix or workaround to this problem.

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Last updated on June 29th 1999. V 1.3