AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+ (2.13 Ghz)
1024 MB Ram
60 GB ALI 5229 Hard Drive
ALI 5451 Sound Card
15.4 WXGA LCD
ATI IGP 320 Integrated Video (64MB Shared)
CDRW/DVD (HL-DT-STDC-RW/DVD Drive GCC-424IN)
Broadcom BCM4401 10/100 LAN
Broadcom BCM4306 80211/b/g Wireless LAN
4 USB 2.0, 1 Firewire
Really, any modern distribution should install with minimal effort on this laptop. So far, I have installed Ubuntu 5.04, Mandriva (2005 LE), Linspire 5.0 and Suse 9.3. There are only a few gotchas to keep in mind:
On many distro's sound does not appear to work out of the box (although it did on Suse 9.3). This has to do with certain audio switches needing to be turned off by default. You should have the External Amplifier and the Jack Sense switches off and then you should be good to go.
The integrated wireless card needs Ndiswrapper to work. Linspire does this by default, Mandriva has a wizard that lets you browse to the windows drivers. Under Suse 9.3, you must execute the command 'modprobe -l PATH\TO|WINDOWS\INF\FILE.inf' in a shell. After this, i tried 'modprobe -m' to cause the ndisrwrapper module to be automatically loaded, but it didn't work, so I has to add 'modprobe ndiswrapper' to a startup file (such as /etc/rc.d/boot.local).
If you want 3D support for the ATI card, follow the instructions as http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/
Some distro's will struggle with the 1280 x 800 default resolution of the WXGA LCD. Occasionally, some fonts seemed to get “smooshed”, leaving the character 'm' looking like a cross between an 'm' and an 'n'. You may need to play with the default fonts, or just live with it.
Tom Dison
fretinator AT smallvue DOT com
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