Designed to be a reasonably priced mid-level product, this laptop is an excellent purchase. It weighs in at a paltry 5.2 pounds, which makes it light enough to transport easily.
Suprisingly, it was actually easier to install Fedora Core 5 than it was to install WindowsXP. Fedora picked up most of the hardware during the installation process. The Intel Core Duo processor was correctly identified and a multiprocessor SMP kernel was automatically installed and recognized both processor cores. The integrated audio chipset was not recognized during the install, but was recognized and functioned properly upon booting up for the first time. The integrated Intel ProWireless abg card was not recognized by the system and required manual configuration. A driver for 3945 chipset in this card is available through the
ipw3945 project. Although Fedora included a ieee80211 module by default, the module needed to be removed and re-installed. RPMs were available from ATRPMs (see links in ipw3945 project site for direct links to the necessary RPMs). Several different RPMs are available, however the SMP kmdl worked on this laptop. A good guide for getting the wireless card working was available
here . WPA worked using wpa_supplicant with the following settings in the /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant file:
Code:
INTERFACES="-ieth1"
DRIVERS="wext"
The /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file was
Code:
configured as follows:
trl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
network={
ssid="<my_ssid>"
scan_ssid=1
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk="<my_wpa_psk_password>"
}
An OT note: WindowsXP will not recognize the SATA hard disk during installation and requires a third party driver from gateway (D00455-001-001.exe). This requires a floppy disk for installation so either an integrated floppy or external USB floppy is required (make sure to read install docs as only a few USB floppy drives can be used).
