Well, after a few false starts I have this thing running more or less. This one is only for those experienced with linux that can deal with a lot of tweaking/reading etc...

First, the things that work great:
- ethernet
- usb
- sound
- cpu frequency scaling

Things that work with various degrees of tweaking:
- 802.11g wireless
- vga (Xorg)
- touchpad

Things that I haven't tested yet:
- modem
- cardbus bridge
- svideo

The ethernet works fine with the 8139too driver. Two USB busses, ohci and ehci, both work fine (including usb mouse, which you will want to use while trying to get the trackpad up and running). Soundcard uses the intel i8x0 driver. Counterintuitively, the cpu frequency scaling uses the powernow-k8 driver, even though this isn't a 64 bit Opteron.

The wifi is a broadcom chip, which requires ndiswrapper. I grabbed the driver from the Windows XP driver cd that came with the laptop. Once installed, it does work, and the blue light on the front even lights up when a wireless connection is present. Keep in mind that there is a hardware switch on the front of the laptop, which cuts off power to the wireless adapter.

The nv driver will work with X, but you have to use the binary nvidia drivers with this laptop or else when you quit X your screen will be filled with fast scrolling lines and other junk that makes the display useless.

The trackpad uses the synaptics driver, including the Alps patch. It works fairly well including the double-tap, but I have not been able to get the scroll area on the right of the trackpad to work yet.

The modem is a winmodem, so I don't have much hope for it. I haven't tried to get it to work, and I don't expect I ever will. I haven't tried the cardbus.

So: It was probably my fault for using gentoo but this beast was very trying to get running smoothly. Now that it is up and running it is treating me very good. I installed Ubuntu on it at first, and Ubuntu actually did a very good job of configuring this thing out of the box. Unfortunately after playing for a few days I just couldn't stand all the cruft so I tried again with Gentoo. Knoppix livecd does quite well too, except for the touchpad.

All in all....don't buy this laptop unless you can invest time in getting it set up properly. But if you want to, there is lots of help for this laptop (and similar models) out there, in fact it even has it's own linux mailing list:

http://mail.kdewebdev.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000

There's a trick to the track pad I wish I'd known right away. You need to boot the kernel (including when you start the installation) with the option

i8042.nomux

Once Fedora Core 3 is installed you need to change /etc/grub.conf so that the kernel boot line has this option. For example:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.10-1.760_FC3 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet i8042.nomux

I got this from a good, related setup site by Greg Gulik

http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/compaqr3000z-fc3.php

and confirmed it on various lists. If you don't do this then the track pad functions intermittently. Ignore advice about doing a modprobe and an rmmod of the sermouse or psmouse modules. That's just a way of making the kernel look again, hopefully seeing both keyboard and trackpad.

The Wireless networking interface came up with no problems following the instruction for the ndiswrapper module at

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforce.net/phpwiki/index.php/Fedora

and using the Broadcom drivers at Greg Gulik's site above. Logging in to a wireless network worked first time.

The NVidia display drivers work well, the 3D is very, very fast (http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html and follow the instructions for the Linux IA32 drivers. See also http://www.glug.us/phpwiki/ and the page "Installing Fedora Core 2 on a AMD64 laptop, Compaq R3240US (Presario R3000 series)"). Apparently the newest version of the drivers only works with Kernel 2.6.10. The first thing I did, however, after a base Fedora Core install was to do a full "yum update" on the system.

CPU scaling works, you have to have the powernow_k8 module loaded, even though this isn't a k8 machine. I've been using the cpuspeed daemon that comes with Fedora and configures nicely through KDE. I have the following in /etc/rc.local:

modprobe powernow_k8
echo 1600000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed

The CPU speeds allowed can be seen from the file

more /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies
1600000 800000

At 800Mhz the laptop feels sluggish. At 1.6Ghz it's pleasantly quick. 800Mhz is more than fast enough to play a movie with Xine (20% cpu usage). I'm using my usual KDE environment and am pleased.

Here's a tip: the little utility x2x can be used to transfer keyboard and mouse control from your workstation to the laptop. You need to be logged in on both machines, and the laptop screen set to take TCP connections and authorised to take connections from your workstations. I use the laptop as a second CPU and a second screen when it is connected to my home network. You don't want to do this wirelessly or on an untrusted network though, it's not secure.