I'm a newbie. With great effort and after 3 different distros I have successfully installed a functioning Linux OS (Mandrake 9) on my Sony PCG-R505DCK laptop, dual-boot with Win2000. By functioning I mean I can use GUI apps essential to my work - OOo 1.0.1, mail, and my Handspring through JPilot. Many hw issues remain.

By newbie I mean a real newbie. I know how to use KDE, install apps from a terminal, and run my apps. I am prepared to learn - I want to be free of MSFT - and if it takes me months so be it. All the resources I have found so far are still over my head. I feel like a person who only knows how to drive but needs to rebuild the engine and has neither tools nor knowledge. I tried to read the Linux Kernel FAQ and found it incomprehensible at the third page.

I suppose what I am looking for most is suggestions on where to go for help, but if anyone has immediate and magical solutions many thanks. (And, if this is too many ?s for one post, or even one thread, I can chop them up - etiquette advice welcomed.)

1) No CD/ no Firewire

Unlike other Sony laptops with external PC card CDs, this line - "SuperSlim" - has a docking station in which the laptop sits. The dock contains a Firewire DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. I can't mount it. I can mount the floppy so I think it's the Firewire part. I also tried plugging in an external Firewire drive - no love.

I fail at insmod ohci1394. I am not sure, but I think my problem is that I don't know what parameters to pass. I have tried "pci=biosirq" and it didn't work. According to Win2000 (the computer's original OS) the drive is on IRQ 9.

2) No trackpad

I installed Mandrake while at my desk, which meant that I had a USB mouse and keyboard plugged in. Undocked, I can use the laptop's own keyboard, but the trackpad doesn't work. I don't know if this means it is unsupported, or that the installation stopped looking for mice once it found the external.

I also have no JogDial but I never ever use the thing and can live without that.

3) Only 256-color video

The laptop has an Intel 830M chip, and wants to be set at 1024x768x70hz, not flat screen. It only seems to support 8-bit and 32-bit color, but the 830 driver won't accept 32-bit as an option. This one seems to require rebuilding the kernel.

4) Crappy sound

Intel sound chip. Playing MP3s through XMMS results in them fading in and out like a cassette tape misaligned on the head, and general scratchiness.

5) Won't support PC Card adaptor Compact Flash card

Inserting the Compact Flash PC card adaptor causes the OS to hang. If it is in at boot it hangs the boot on cardmgr until the card is ejected. If card is inserted after boot and KDE start, it hangs then.

FINALLY - Mandrake is the only distro I can seem to use. I started with SuSE 8.1, which after putting the entire 4.7 GIGs on my Fat32 partition could run YaST and seemed like it could mount the DVD-ROM drive but couldn't find the software packages on the harddisk. RH 8.0 installed fine but I got caught on the loopback interface bug discussed in this forum - no way to get past it.

Many many many many thanks for your patience.