I've always been a slacker at heart, and when I saw a distro named after my favorite modus operandi, I was like "wow, that'd be neat, I should look that up sometime... After my nap...."

So, jokes aside I've got an HP Pavilion laptop which I am looking for a straightforward-to-install distro to work with, and was wondering if anyone who uses Slackware has any experience installing on HP laptops, with their softmodems and ATI Radeon graphics cards..? If broadcom wireless can be ported successfully, it'd be triple-yummy..

Thanks for any feedback!

broadcom and linux dont go together.
I have slack on my Toshiba Sattelite A15 and its great, but no winmodems or broadcom chips there...
The ati stuff should work great for you though.

Broadcom chips are supported under this project:

ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net

I'm running Slack 10 on my toshiba satellite right now, with a linksys wireless G card with a broadcom chip, and ndiswrapper.

The radeon chips are supported by either the Xorg/kernel radeon module, or by the proprietary ATI drivers. If you want to dive in deep, give Slack a try.

The install is very simple, and most configuration is done through straight editing of text files. It's very straightforward.

--Shade

Same here.
I am using Slack 10 on my Sattelite 1620 CDS, and all goes well.

My Wifi card was configured with ndiswrapper 0.10 but I haven't tried it yet, Monday is coming.

Some drivers, however don't get along with ndiswrapper, I used the
Win2K ones and the card seems good to go, WinXP ones, stay clear.

The Wifi card is an Asus WL-100g.

Slap Slack on the laptop and be free!

If the WiFi card works ok, I'll remove Windows from it, plain simple.

To add to the discussion:
I consider slack to be one of the better distros for laptops, simply because it has less overhead than many other more "automatic" distros which run all kinds of daemons managing settings, auto-generating configs and the like... Slack runs only what's necessary, so you're back to basics so to speak and you use your power for just what you need. It's much more efficient when running on batteries.

--Shade

I'm running a toshiba satellite p25-s507 and slack really hasn't given me any problems.

I had to toy with ALSA to get the sound working, and I really had to toy with the cdrw/dvdrw to get it working.

I'm running Slack on a Compaq Presario 2548EA, which less face it, is a rebranded HP Laptop. Have no problems what so ever. Cannot comment though on the modem as I have never used it.

Slack on an IBM T40 with ATI Radeon = joy.

I'd say give it a try no matter what. What do you have to lose? -- J.W.

Awesome, thanks for the helpful replies, I'm very heartened and I will put slack on my system. I have a varying connection speed, so I better learn to use ndiswrapper in any case, since I may be connected via wireless, modem, ethernet, all in the same day if I move around enough..

Anyone recommend any good books with decent learning curve and good poweruser info as well? (preferably with a reasonably stable and up-to-date distro included, since I don't like downloaded 1-2G worth of files, that's a lot of coffee and scones and cigarettes and billiards while I wait at the coffeeshop or the bar..)

PS, EYELINER, PLEASE post whether or not your wifi usage is successful! I'm *extremely* interested in hearing about a wifi linux success story, I've put Windows into a space of less than 20G on my HD now, I just realise that I don't USE it that much for anything, except surfing and downloading (and windows security is horrid, I bog down my system from so many anti-spy-virus-ad-popup apps running in the background!)

Will do.
I'm quite eager to know if it works as well.

Good call going with Slack. Useful books:

1. Slackware boot
2. O'Reilly's Running Linux
3. Rute

Happy reading with the coffee and scones, or smokes and a brew -- J.W.

Awesome, thanks for the book list, I'm especially happy to ahve an Oreilly book in the list, they make wonderful texts.. I have to use Redhat9 in a class this semester, and the book ""Linux User's Guide: Using the Command Line and Gnome with Red Hat Linux 9.0 (by Carolyn Gillay)" is TRULY heinous... It doesn't even show how to cd until page 145! The teacher told me that he's leaving each student to install on their own, but the book has no install guide at all in it, I pity some of the students in my class, the ones who take notes when he shows how to rename files, etc...

But I digress, I'm headed to the bookstore probably sometime this weekend to grab the oreilly book for sure, and I'll look into the essentials book as well, it seems very reasonably priced - oh wait no CDs hehe, no wonder..

I don't drink beer anymore, or I'd be beating someone up with my laptop for beating me at billiards, but thanks for the thought!

I would also recommend O'Reilly's Running Linux. Lot's of useful information in there. Also, you might want to take a look at The Linux Documentation Project, they have some really good books in the guide section.

I run Slack 10 on a Dell Inspiron 7500 with a soft LT Winmodem with no bother. Just had to get a driver from Stuttgart - http://www.heby.de/ltmodem -- . There are links on this page to more general info on Winmodems if you have a different type.

I run Slackware on my HP Pavilion zt3000 notebook. It has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 and an Intel pro 2100 wireless card (the "Centrino" card). There is a driver for the Winmodem on this notebook from the ALSA project (since it is tied in with the sound chipset, an Intel 82801DB) that is supposed to work, but I have never had occasion to use the modem so I have never configured it. I have the Intel sponsored open source driver for the net card running quite acceptably. The video and sound for this laptop also work very well.