My Compaq Presario 900 which is very Linux-sensitive took on Arklinux (www.arklinux.org) perfectly.

Hi
Just for info..
I have IBM 600e, and T20, both running RedHat9.

600E is fine, exxcept no sound, which doesn't bother me in the slightest. Has 'trashed' hard disk, which I formatted (with DOS) into several small partitions, about 250-500-1Gig megs each.
Formatted those that formatted, removed those partitions where there were irrecoverable errors, and in the RH installation Disk-Druid, set up an LVM to put the partitions back together as one über-disk.. took a couple of hours, but it works fine.

T20 - sound fine, but DVD 'shaky', so I rip DVD's first to hard disk, then view. Standby works a treat, I also have aux. battery in the CD player 'slot'. Standby for days on end.

Don't think I'd move away from IBM, except to get one of this tiny SonyVaio's, esp. if they get the camera sorted out!

Actually, installing Mandrake 9.1 onto my old HP XE2 notebook was easier than re-installing Win98SE from the recovery disk after I installed a new hard disk a year ago.

With Mandrake I installed a new (bigger) hard disk, stuck the CD in the drive and switched on, changed CD's when told to and everything just works. I now have a spare hard disk (the one with Win98SE on) if I ever need one.

Terry

(new to Linux but old at most everything else)

I have installed Slack9 on a Compaq Presario EA2548 laptop. Only problems are no sound and drivers for USB 2.0 ports no good. Had to turn off the hotplug system. Any know how I can get drivers/rpm for USB2.0 or even UBS1??

I'd suggest downloading most recent kernel-source(-2.4.22) package from Slackware FTP and compiling kernel with USB1.1+2 (usb2 = ehci, usb1 = uhci (intel, via) or ohci (others))

I installed Mandrake 9.1 on a Dell Inspiron 8000,and it has worked out quite well,even got the onboard winmodem to work with a driver from linmodems.org.

I find that brand name isn't that significant. I took a course in Unix in college and we used Linux to learn it. Thirty people in the class all had notebooks representing a wide variety of brands and eras. The instructor passed out CD-boot copies of Knoppix.
Linux failed on half of them outright. We were able to do some tweaking and in the end, all but five notebooks were running. The five that weren't consisted a Gateway (mine), one HP, two Dells, and a Toshiba. It was all graphics related, natch, when trying to run KDE. The successful ones consisted of HPs, Dells, Toshibas, and Compaqs.

My problem was the Intel 830M graphics chipset. in my Gateway Solo 1450. SuSE ran but in a crippled color mode. I was okay with that until Xfree 4.3.0 came out. I was told that this new release of Xfree would solve all my problems and it did. I got the cobranded version of Xfree off of SuSE and I was happy! Man, I got great graphics and had blown-up photographs for my desktop... couldn't do that before.

I later got Red Hat 9 to play with, and was really humming. I was just getting ready to pull the plug on Windows completely when disaster struck.

The power jack in my gateway broke and I had to send my whole computer back for repairs. They did something but the bottom line is that I still have the same 830M chipset but I can't run any version of Linux now. My system is hosed. Gateway won't say what, but it's as if they saw the Linux on my system and did something to permanently cripple it. I'm sure nothing sinister was done, but I am back to Windows exclusively again. I tried cleaning off my hard drive, making new partitions and installing new (both SuSE and Red Hat latest versions which support my hardware). The worst part is that I can't get help because my problem makes no sense. Xfree 4.3.0 was written, in part, to solve specific problems with the chipsets in the Gateway Solo 1450's and some HP's with the same chipset.

So, bye-bye Linux until I can afford a new computer. Gateway has no clue and nobody else does, either!

i don't see how gateway could permenantly cripple a computer to keep it from installing linux. why not try a low level format of your computer (provided you have an actual windows install cd and not some stinking recovery cd). back up all your data, low level format your hard drive, go into bios and move cd drive to be the first bootable drive, install windows, and then install linux.

I agree with you.

I don't see how they could and I don't think that they would if they could, but it's very, very strange. The thing works great before I send it back and it comes back with the same hardware specifications but won't work and won't let itself be repaired.

I did as you suggested but four hours of blood, sweat, and tears doing that produced nothing but where I was before I started.
I even tried SuSE and Red Hat! Those are the two friendliest installations.

Thanks for the reply!

that is most certainly odd. i still don't see how they could you from installing linux. most definately odd. you sure you did a low level format? maybe the cds are bad. i dunno. it's just too odd...

It is weird. You bring up a good point.. did I do a true low-level format? I used a third-party program that I kept around for the few times that I would have to do it.

Windows doesn't skip a beat when installing...

The only thing I can think of, and I never had to do it before, is install the Intel Linux drivers for the chipset family and then recompile the Kernel.. if I knew how to do that! I just ran the RPM file and it told me that the package was installed. Hmmm...

One of those things that I may just have to fiddle with... good challenge, unfortunately I don't have the time to mess with it right now.

what 3rd party program you using? usually i'd recommed going to your hdd manufacturer's site and getting a low level formatting utility from them.

so is linux installed? compiling the kernel in windows won't do you a bit of good, if that's what your getting at. different types of system calls and what not, i would imagine. i don't know though. like i said this seems odd.

I had a Toshiba Satellite with a 1.8GHz Celeron. Worked like crap with Redhat 9. Worked absolutely flawless with Redhat 8.0. Worked just fair with SuSE 8.2.

I now have a Dell Latitude D600 1.3GHz Pentium M. Works like crap with Redhat 9. Doesn't work at all with SuSE 8.2. So gonna try out Slackware 9

I'll let you know how it works

I installed Mandrake 9.1 on Compaq Presario 2100 which did not have Firewire or wireless networking (one of my friends had problems with those) and everything including the touch pad got installed without my intervention except modem (winmodem) and APM. But Mandrake distro had Linuxant modem driver which I had to install on command prompt and in Lilo you have to specify that APM should be loaded. (You can do this using the GUI).

Sorry, buddy, but uh, i just bought a HP pavilion ze5385us, and installed slack 9.

works like a charm. I dont think hardware really matters it comes to linux. there's always a driver somewhere on the net.

While bloat distros like redhat, suse, and mandrake come packaged like a MS windows-nightmare version of linux, it is best to start with a pretty bare system like slack and install only what your need.

why crowd your system with useless drivers and packages you don't need?

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once you go slack, you never go back