I am considering buying an Alienware Area 51m laptop. I want to dual boot with XP and Slackware 9.1. Does anyone have any experience with Alienware laptops and linux? If so what are your feelings on it and what recommendations could you make that would help me?
Thanks very much in advance,
Ken Gutkowski

I can't afford to have experience with an Alienware, but that doesn't really help you.

We've got a couple multi-booting slack, debian and xp no probs.
But have had probs with RH9 and Fedora 2. Not sure why yet.
possibly an issue with IO devices and modules in RH/Fedora

check the hardware compatibility... alienware guys "customize" computers... check the hardware youd like in your area 51m for compatibility with linux and go fot it

Linux hardware compatibility has grown in an exponential way.

Hope that helps!

I have an Area 51 m (type 5620 aka the beast) with XP Pro and Fedora 2 dual boot
It works ok but there are a few problems I've run into. Here they are:
Initially the monitor will only go to a resolution of 800x600 because it cannot be probed. Calling Alienware to find out what kind of monitor in your system is a waste of time because they honestly don't know. However, it is a fairly easy fix, once you get the right horz and vert rates along with the modes of resolution you know you are capable of doing in your xorg.conf file
The touchpad driver is nuts. Mind of its own. I dont use it anyway, using an external mouse works fine. However, its a standard synaptics touch pad, I'm sure theres a driver or fix for it out there somewhere.

Any other questions let me know

Can you please post the necessary settings to use the screen at the correct resolution?

Just to add that I have also managed to get the Area-51m to work fine with dual boot XP/FC1. I had problems with FC2 in booting, so I have reverted to FC1.

However with FC1 I cannot get the nVidia drivers working (from www.nvidia.com). And I think the wireless is not working either, but I have not look thoroughly on this.

Thanks,

Vlad.

I am also looking into an AlienWare Area 51m and would be glad to receive the XF86config necessary to get higher resolutions.

Regarding the Synaptics touchpad issue, the most recent driver can be downloaded from
http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/index.html

I run another laptop with a Synaptics touchpad. The driver is included in my SuSE 9.1 and all works fine.
See also http://tinyurl.com/68lg7

P.

Unfortunately, no help will come from Alienware themselves:

Original letter:
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I am interested in a customized Area 51m 5500 Alienware laptop.

However, a determinant factor for me is to know whether Alienware provides any support for the Linux operating system, or certifies in any way that the hardware inside the laptop is supported by current Linux distributions.

If that were not the case, is it possible to obtain from Alienware a detailed list of all the components inside the laptop (brand, model, chipset, etc) so potential buyers can verify whether or not this material is Linux compatible?
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Reply from Alienware:
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We truly appreciate your interest in our systems. Unfortunately, Alienware does not support Linux and we cannot guarantee that the components we use would be compatible with Linux. Currently all our systems are being sold only with Windows XP Home, Professional or Media Center Edition.

Due to internal policies, we are not able to disclose any information regarding our providers.

We hope this information proves to be helpful and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. If you have any other questions or technical issues, do not hesitate to contact us again, or visit our Knowledge Base at http://support.alienware.com.

Thank you for choosing Alienware and have a nice day.
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P.