Gateway M675 Users
 

Question to all the M675 users out there (I saw the small smattering of threads on this unit):

Do any of you have the function buttons for contrast, mute, and volume working? I have FC5 on mine and any pressing of those buttons locks the machine up instantly. I traced it down to the fact that those buttons (and Status) all make the little green window appear in the upper left corner to tell you the volume, contrast level, or battery status; respectively.

Apparently that green window kills something and perma-locks the workstation. Thank goodness the power button still worked.

So first question: do you have it working?
Second question: which distro and how?
Final question: Is this a driver, bios, kernel, or "other" issue?

I have quite a bit of experience with Linux from a server side. I played around with FC3 a while back on this laptop, but never in this detail. I am very comfortable modifying XFree86 conf files, installing drivers, and monkeying around with just about anything.

All help appreciated! Thanks,
AC

Edit: The little green window appears in Windows only. I've never seen it in Linux.

Yes it does work, though there seems to be a couple of small issues...

I have it working in Slack 10.2 on a 2.6 kernel with KDE. I had to configure it in Control center, and set keyboard model to M$ Natural Keyboard Pro/ M$ Internet keyboard pro. At this point all of my media keys were enabled, though not necessarily working with every program, since you have to configure those manually depending on the program.

The small issues are: if you boot straight into X, and dont adjust the volume while viewing a console screen, if you adjust it in X, KDE will change the volume, but the little green screen looks all screwy. I'm sure there's a way to fix this, I just dont know how. I have found that if you switch to a console screen, change the volume, the screen appears normal, and if you switch back to your X session, the green screen will display fine, only other issue is that the volume bars in the green screen dont change, so really all in all it is quite useless to even worry about the green screen.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the reply. I will have to try playing around with KDE. I learned on gnome, so I usually default to it, but I will see if I can correct this in KDE.

I'm not as concerned with getting the buttons to work as I am making sure the laptop doesn't lock up if I accidentally press one.

Thanks again,
a