While I hate to see everyone having problems, it's still somehow nice to have company. I have a zv6015, and have found that many distros fail for various reasons and in various places.

Currently, I have a SuSe 9.1 installed, but have been unable to reliably keep my network card running--only keeping it up on occasion with a static IP. It's never received an IP through DHCP successfully, and even after documenting the steps I've taken configuring and re-configuring the card, it only seems to work on occasion.

I had the keyboard lockup on Kubuntu (the KDE-version of Ubuntu) until I tried the Fn + [Left Shift] trick, which moved me past the initial Choose Language screen. Unfortunately, I'm now stuck with an error indicated the installation CD cannot be mounted. I'll be trying a few more and will report on their success.

A question: what does the Fn + [Left Shift] trick do? Some sort of keyboard reset? I haven't found any documentation on it.

You apparently found a way but I'll list the two I know of in case someone else needs the help:

1) Hang an external monitor off the laptop. It seemed like shift + tab unlocked things. Once you get past the stupid logo graphic at the bottom of the text output, you can use the control keys to switch back to the laptop display.

2) I read elsewhere that starting the install with "linux nofb" or something along those lines to keep the frame buffer stuff from loading works.

Cheers

So does this laptop work? Mainly getting everything to install and at least having the display work. I dont care about 3d acceleration as long as GNOME functions properly.

I am looking to buy a new laptop and I narrowed down my search to either this HP laptop or a Acer Centrino, and I need to determine if this laptop wont work for me.

Whatever laptop I buy I plan on running FedoraCore4 on it.

So does this laptop function for everyone now or should I look elsewhere for a Linux laptop?

Also did anyone try FedoraCore4 final on the laptop? Any luck? I need to know if I should buy this laptop or not, thanks.

How about the answer is "sort of". I'm running FC4 x86_64 on it and that's how I'm typing this post. Here's a quick list of the work-arounds I had to use/am using:

1) Install with FC4 nofb or the display goes weird. Text mode doesn't help.
2) If you want to be able to dual boot to Windoze, shrink the existing XP installation and install in what's left. HP's copy of XP didn't like not having a previous version of XP on the disk when I decided I still needed some of the windoze functionality. Luckily I had a copy w2k that I could install that seems to have made the HP OS disk happy and let me re-install XP (10 GB partition + 2GB FAT32 in case I need to move something in either direction).
3) Have a USB mouse attached while installing since the Synaptics touchpad isn't recognized by the FC4 install kernel.
4) The good news is grub works just fine to boot XP.
5) Once you have FC4 x86_64 installed, set up grub to pass "no_timer_check" to the kernel as a parameter or the clock runs about 2X too fast.
6) ndiswrapper works for getting the built-in Broadcom wireless NIC working. The Realtek NIC is directly supported so its no issue.
7) To get the touchpad to work I added:

echo -n "reconnect" > /sys/bus/serio/devices/serio0/drvctl

to /etc/rc.d/rc.local.
8) The PCMCIA slot is non-functional at the moment. This appears to be a wider 2.6 kernel problem. I'm still researching the problem.

Othe than the above, it works great. 64 bit Linux is amazingly fast on this beasty.

hello everyone. found this forum on a google search as i was deciding on whether to upgrade my amd 64 3500+ 2.2ghz 1024 ram 100gb laptop to windows x64 professional. now i'm reading about fedora and such and don't really know what i want. i'm basically a new web developer that has no choice but to survive in this market. i'm 30, i live in mexico and need to stay ahead of the pack somehow. since i'm learning more and more everyday i've gained an interest in learning linux so that i can eventually learn more about running my own servers. what do you guys recommend. my laptop is basically for visiting clients. my desktop pc is a dell dual pentium 4 3ghz with 1024ram and an 80gb with an additional 200gb hard drive. what computer do you recommend i do something with? i also read that places like rackspace hosting actually use red hat enterprise 3 or 4. do you guys recommend that or fedora. i'm a complete virgin when it comes to anything past my old apple 2c and windows.

If you go with Fedora for hosting, be forewarned that youll need to upgrade to the latest Fedora release at least once a year to be up with updates. In addition, Fedora is like a testing ground for RHEL.

///what computer do you recommend i do something with?

huh?

i meant what computer from the two i got. so could i still keep windows and have both OS?

yea u just partition the hard drive and then install Fedora to one section and windows to the other and change it in the bootloader (LILO or GRUB) to do both.

Wait so let me get this straight are you going to be doing web hosting or not? You might want to create a new thread though as this is really just about this HP laptop, unless thats ur laptop.

yeah i also have the laptop. i would like to really have red hat enterprise 3 or 4 because that is what the major hosting companies use. is there anyway to get redhat for free. i assume fedora is the lower level version am i right? do you think it's actually possible then for me to host from my house using a broadband connection 1024kb. using linux on my p.c. i already have XAMPP installed on windows but i guess i would install it on linux. can this be done then? how much space will i need. i'm thinking of doing it on my desktop since it has 225gb free. any pointers on this?

oooooooooooooo I didnt know that this was the specific laptop that you own. Fedora is basically a beta version of RHEL. There is no need to buy or get RHEL just for your personal and small business use when you can just be up to date with Fedora. But if your running a server you might want to run RHEL due to stability and long life span. It is possible for u to host off from ur house but it might be a bit slow. You need as much space as you plan on hosting for web content.

Got SuSE 9.3 running on my zv6015. No problems during installation, and the network card seems stable. About to configure wireless, and will report, though I'm hopeful. Still seems like there's nothing on the ATI 200M front.

I hated going with a commercial distro, but this new hardware just drives me nuts. I had to figure what my time was worth against the fun of screwing with other distros.

There is a driver for the ATI 200M IGP.
ATI Proprietary Linux x86_64 Driver 8.13.3 for Radeon Xpress 200 Series
Look under "Motherboards" not "Notebooks"

Here's a link:
https://support.ati.com/ics/support/...ge&folderID=27

Yeah, I found it not long after posting. Still not quite configured correctly, but I do have the screen resolution up to 1280x800.

There's also a bit of a FAQ at:
http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2005/04/akulk_ati93.html

This is incorrect for 64-bit drivers, so take note of command-line changes, adding the 64 when necessary.

You know, I'm not an idiot, but it seems like these configurations get more and more irritating. At least, back in 1995, I could just work from a term most of the time and not worry about all the nice bells and whistles. Something snapped in my head somewhere along the way and made me want to play with GUIs more and more. Sheesh.

There's a newer
ATI Proprietary Linux x86_64 Driver 8.13.4 for Radeon Xpress 200 Series
posted today on the ATI Suppport site. Follow the link in the post above.
Look under "Motherboards" not "Notebooks"

It builds the same as before; I still get only 2D.