Has anyone tried installing Debian or any other distro on a Gateway MX6445 or any other mx series?

Laptop hardware:
AMD Turion 64 1800mhz
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M
Broadcom 802.11g wireless
Marvell Yukon 88E8036 PCI-E
Synaptics PS/2 Port TouchPad
PHILIPS DVD+-RW SDVD8820
Conexant AC-Link Audio
Texes Instruments 4 in 1 Card reader

I tried to install Debian 3.1 (sarge) and had nothing but problems.

First I tried Knoppix 5.0 and everything seems to look fine while booting up, then when the KDE panel should appear nothing happens, just a wallpaper and a pointer, eventually freezing within a minute. It seems to be detecting all the hardware though.

I tried to install Debian 3.1 r2 and that was worse. First I couldn't get the network running, tried the sk98lin driver on the marvel yukon 88E8036 and still couldn't get it working. Also the 2.4 kernel seems to have trouble fully accessing the HD, so without the network I could only update to kernel 2.6.8-11. Still had some HD issues (mostly just annoying messages) and ACPI issues with the proccessor. I also couldn't get GDM or KDM to work with the ATI card.


I know after a lil bit of reading I hear ATI video and Marvel network cards are a pita to get working under Linux, even in desktops.

Maybe there is another disto I'll have better luck with?

I have nearly the same specs on my laptop, except it's a celeron m with intel graphics.

Ubuntu dapper and PCLinuxOS work 'out of the box'. PCLinuxOS will play mp3s and has all the multimedia plugins 'out of the boxPCLinuxOS'. I'm currently using Fedora Core 5/planet CCRMA. It took a little more fiddling and set up, but the ethernet worked right out of the box.

sky2 is the ethernet driver that works for the ethernet (although it is only in kernels 2.6.15 and higher). For wireless, ndiswrapper with the gateway drivers will work (or at least it did for me). I wanted a more linux native solution, so I bought an atheros mini pci card (although an intel pro mini pci would have worked).

Regarding the ATI display: On a laptop at work, I have a dell with the 300M chipset running ubuntu dapper. It works with ubuntu dapper, but I haven't tried ATI's proprietary drivers with it. Do a little searching to see other people's experience with the the 200M chipset.

--edit--I have a gateway MX6124, and I haven't tried the card reader (don't have any use for it)

I was at another house and wanted to try Knoppix again, and i left version 5 at home. I had a copy of version 4 around and decided to try that. It worked! No problems detecting sound or video, or mouse. The wireless still didn't work and I wasn't able to test the Marvel card. I have no idea about the 4 in 1 card reader cuz I don't really have a use for it either. Some processes under knoppix 4 seemed to be on speed though, like watching videos or even the busy mouse icons. Also that could be the cause my laptop was getting hotter than usual. I'm not positive but I don't remember hearing the fan kick in either.

From what I know Ubuntu is Debian based so maybe I will give that a try, so stuff like the multi-media plug-ins should be no problem to install.

I've got the same graphics card and wireless. Both work excellent with PCLOS big daddy.

Synaptic has the Ati driver package. Tuxracer works just as well if not better than any of my nvidia equiped machines.

Pclos has a gui for configuring ndswrapper and drivers. Very simple. Someone has posted a how-to in the pclos forum.

You may need to chose a frame buffer mode when booting from the cd to obtain display.