Has anyone tried installing SUSE 9.3 on an Acer Ferrari 4005 notebook yet? I'd be interested in hearing what success or lack of success you've had. I read a post on another forum that made the venture sound quite dismal with a number of things not working. This is dissapointing. One of the reasons I bought this computer was that it has an AMD64 processor and I wanted to do SUSE Linux 64 bit on it.

Ripped out the windows disk, put a new 100GB 7200rpm IDE disk in
the Laptop, loaded the DVD, and it boots. However, SuSE installer
thinks it is only an ASCII screen.

We connected to the analogue video port an external LCD screen with a
native resolution of 1280*1024, SuSE loads. Note that we told the monitor
configuration in SaX2 during the load process that it was an LCD. SaX2
decided it wanted to use 1280*1024 so we left it alone.

Rebooted. It all comes up. We have a KDE login screen. Mind you, it is
trying to pump 1280*1024 onto a 1680*1050 ATI X700 chip going to a
1280*1024 LCD screen. The color make it close to impossible to read.
We kept going. Logged in. Where are my glasses. Fired up SaX2 to
try to reconfigure. We tried every ATI X700, VESA, LCD combination
we could . Nothing worked. We then looked up the web ( on another
SuSE laptop ) and saw that the X700 has so many driver issues that
we gave up. You could SSH into the Ferrari and the system rocks as
a server. But a laptop on which you cannot use the screen is useless.

But, it would appear that the only problem was the ATI X700 driver.

So, we put the Windows XP disk back in the box, grabbed a copy of
the demo copy of XWin32, from starnet.com, configured XDCMP, then
pointed it our main Linux server with Remote Administration Enabled
so that it is running KDM, and we now have a nice, X-terminal running
at 1680*1050 resolution. A bit expensive but it rocks when connected
on a 1Gb network to the Linux server.

OK, to make it vaguely useful we need to but XWin32 at $225 which
is more than SuSE 9.3 Pro, But at least the box on the desk can look
like it is running SuSE.

So, until Suse 9.X, where X is probably 5 based on delays of SuSE
supporting a Ferrari 3000, we have to treat the Ferrari 4005 as a
mega-expensive X-terminal. Mind you, if somebody fixed the X700
driver, and had the correct SaX2, or even manual, installation notes,
the problem would go away.

- Damian

I have the same issues as posted here. The video is a major issue along with the keyboard. I did find some workarounds on the video issue, but it didn't work for me. The keyboard configuration issue is really weird. You can't type "hard" if you do, you will get 5-6 of each letter. For now I don't have time to play, it is a great laptop, but limiting with windoze on it.

Have some initial trouble with display as well.
I am able to get 1600x1000 using the driver provided by ATI at https://support.ati.com/ics/support/...ge&folderID=27

If you have any trouble setting it up, pls let me know - I could send to you my xorg.conf file.

As per the WiFi I was able to have it up and running using ndiswrapper along with the 64-bit drivers available at acer

Anynone fixed the problem with the keyboard?

Now, curiously, SUsE is not as fast as WinXP on that machine.

Good luck!
CK

Thanks for the information. Unfortunately, I am travelling heavily over the next month for work and really don't have time to play. Having gone through this before with cutting edge hardware. I was at the point of waiting for the next version of Suse. Now with Open Suse happening I am not sure if this will mean a quicker resolution or longer delay. Keep me in mind, as you solve issues. I have a spare hard drive for this machine and maybe give it a shot while I am on the road.