Not sure where to put it, thought it would be of some basic reference, to a particular model of lap I got. The Acer Aspire 5050 w/ AMD 64 Turion lap.
I've used both the Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn & the newest Sabayon AMD 64 Bit on it . Both for the AMD. w/ ATI Radeon 1100 gfx accel (factory default).
Fiesty:
Sound.
When I downloaded the one w/ .15 kernel sound worked but you had to have the ears of a bat to hear anything unless you connected speakers or a earfone. Even w/ alsamixer maxed out. But when u connected mini speakers, sound was great. Even with the softvol option in mplayer & in player volume boost in VLC, the sound w/o external aides was very tame & dissapointing. You could hear, but you had to be close to it. But at least it worked
And mp3 worked.
BUT....
When I upgraded kernel using the "auto update" to .16, sound stopped working. When I clicked prefs- I saw only OSS as a clickable option. I tried rebuilding ALSA from scratch from tar, no luck. I hope others fair luck this way. I personally found it just easier to boot thru the earlier Kernel.
It's sort of like trying to get sound to work on DSL (damn small linux) on a Toshiba Satellite pro 133 mhz pentium 0 lol.
Video
With win32codecs / gstreamer codecs properly installed using medibuntu repository, you got most video to work, but not xVID for some inexplicable reason. Or some AVI files. However, the gl2, gl, options worked fine. MPEG was playable, some avi worked, mkv worked excellently and ogm worked too....totem sort of blew goats, but mplayer & VLC worked gr8!
Games
NWN worked, no probs. The intro music got choppy, which was fine. Also Vega Strike- but if the sound doesn't work, it's not lap's fault but is the version in ubuntu repository for apt is f--ked- build the game from source.
WINE
Could get C&C renegade to work, but that's it. I didn;t really bother manually configuring WINE though. Just tried ootb.
Google Earth
Worked. No probs.
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Sabayon STANDARD 4.3gb DVD:
Sound
100% seamless integration- got as much volume as it did w/ Vista. (But the other aspects of Vista just made instant castration a better choice than putting up with that piece of ---- for 30 minutes btw). I FINALLY could iisten to mp3 on my lap w/ o earfones or a speaker set.
Softvol settings are actually showing audiable differences in setting. And volume is perfect for the lap's speaker size.
Video
Seamless. Off the bat, I could watch xVID, and almost all that I could in Fiesty right off the bat. I couldn't watch xVID and SOME AVI formats even w/ all the codecs updated successfully. And performance quality of video in VLC Sabayon & also mplayer was somewhat cleaner than in fiesty's. Not by much, but cleaner.
Games
The default package itself is pretty interesting! Esp. Savage! And as far as WINE comp goes, I have yet to test a game on it, but the ones I tested w/ Fiesty (C&C TS, Renegade, Fallout 1 & 2, Tactics, SWKOTOR I&II) all worked in Sab. Except Fallout 2 didn;t for some reason.
Google Earth
Crashed.Didn't work.
CRASH!!!!!
Although Sabayon looked MUCH more cutting edge & efficiently run w/ Sabayon than w/ Fiesty, what gets you w/ Sabayon is RANDOM (but THANKFULLY RARE) unexpected crashes. The system doesn't go for a flip like WIndows, but progs sometimes unexpectedly crash.
When you're working on spreadsheet, and are doing multitaskig, once in a way, the spreadshit just freezes, can't enter data on it. This happens when opening Firefox sometimes.
It's not a big issue like Win GOATS but nevertheless can be a pain in the a-- sometimes. But it happens rare. Bt it NEVER happened w/ Fiesty.
Also the default game "Danger of the Deep" crashed beyond the loadup screen. The intro loaded fine, but when u clicked "play" I just got returned to window manager w/ a bloated 640*480 resolution. The game's default...
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Ubuntu Gutsy
I tried it. And it just works like Fiesty, but w/out sound, so I didn't see the point.....
I've also briefly used FC-6 on this lap. OOTB wise, it worked like Fiesty's. But in 7 & 8- arrrrrg, no sound. Like Gutsy, Fiesty kernel upgrade, etc.
I am not an expert, very novice to Linux... I am only giving a layman's view on 2 Linux distros I've tested & used.
System: Laptop- Acer Aspire 5050 AMD 64 Turion, 1gb RAM, ATI Radeon 1100 gfx.