Goeland86

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I bought my pavilion last year in August, and when I first tried to install redhat on it, well, it simply froze. Research on the net indicated that you wanted to disable legacy USB support in the BIOS.
After that, everything went smoothly, until I tried to get DRM working.
Under redhat 9.0, there was nothing I could do to get it working... Of course, I didn't know how to compile a kernel back then, let alone XFree.
Installing Gentoo 6 months ago allowed me to benefit from many things. First off, select only the necessary hardware in the kernel (no use for all those modules to compile), then I found out how to start-stop-configure speedfreqd, the CPU frequency acpi daemon.
Until the 2.6.9 kernel there was an Xorg patch to get DRM working with the IGP320M, using a tarball from planetmirror.com, but now, with the latest kernel and Xorg releases, nothing is necessary anymore, save including the ATI chipset AGP support in the kernel and setting up Xorg properly. 3D performance remains poor, however, so don't expect to play even Unreal Tournament 2003 on this laptop under linux.
After looking around for the right info I got an external firewire drive working flawlessly (including testing an iPod!), a webcam (ov511 driver) and a wireless network card (Motorola WN825G, listed here, follow the instructions, they work!).
Great value for it's price, I recommend it for anyone who wants a desktop replacement that's not intended for gaming. Plenty of performance from the Athlon XP 2400+, especially when you bootstrap gentoo, you get a faster startup than on a desktop, even though the hard drive is noticeably slower.