I have a Compaq 722 US, and still having a few problems with it.
1. I cant get any ACPI support, and I mean none. It fails on boot saying it cant find /proc/acpi/event or something like that
2. I cant watch any dvd's. Can someone recommend a good player?
3. If my computer sits for a long time idle >6 hours probably, when I come back to unlock it, Linux freezes.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.
Im still somewhat new at this so you might have to spell everything out too

DVD player = Xine or MPlayer.

ACPI ; I haven't been able to get the thing working either (this is not to say it doesn't work... just that I don't currently have the time)... in the mean time I've been using APM.

idle = lock up... I remember seeing issues about this a couple months back, I think the guy had a redhat system. I can't remember if he ever came up with a solution... mine would probably be to try a different distro (debian, suse, slackware... )

jpbarto

Ok, tried Xine, but it doesnt seem to like copywrighted dvd's, and seeing as how most of them are copywrighted, this rules that out. Ill look into the Mplayer.

My APM never worked either. It would say On AC, No Battery, even when the battery was plugged in.

As far as the lock up goes, its only done it twice. I have to reboot, which is suck a pain as you cant unmount the file system and it runs the check. Im running Mandrake 9.1 also.

Im hoping some of these issues, especailly the ACPI are fixed on the new 9.2

Also, my video runs like crap, Im using the S3 Twister K 16MB graphics card that came with it. Does anyone know where to find the right driver for this?

I also had a problem on a desktop kt333 chipset with acpi, I turned it off in the bios, works nicely now w/mandrake 9.1, alternatively you could try acpi=off in your lilo.conf, but that didn't quite do the trick for my board.

It is off in my lilo.conf file, but i thought the point was to have it on?

Anyway, Compaq provides crappy bios, and i cant disable or enable it there

Yes, I would like to have it on, but until the linux support for it matures, it's just not worth the problems. Sadly, it seems quite a few notebook bios options are truncated, mine included. I've read things about the latest kernel and acpi that are good, maybe that's the solution.

Does your notebook run hot with it off? Mine gets extremely warm to the touch, and both fans run constantly, whereas they run only part of the time in Winhoe$.

you mean c$$ encrypted dvds? you'll need to get your hands on libdvdc$$. you'll have to find it yourself as dec$$ has been ruled here in the u.s. to be illegal, and i'd be loathe to even have a link on here for it.

as far as that goes, can we even say dec$$ or libdvdc$$ here?



edit: also, do have all the dependancies necessary for xine, mplayer, or ogle to work? (ie. libdvdread, etc...)

No, I bought an older notebook off of ebay for a song, acpi wasn't around at it's manufacture date so all I use is apm, your newer notebook will be missing some obviously important features without acpi, it's probably time to look into the latest bleeding-edge kernel at kernel.org and see if it works for you.

I havent really messed with the kernel that much. Whats bleeding-edge, and Im not sure I could compile a kernel

There's a howto for compiling a kernel on tldp.org as well as plenty of good docs returned from a google on that topic, it's really not that involved, basically, you set a bunch of options in a menu-esque type of thing, if you screw it up, you just start over. I don't usually recommend it unless there's a very valid reason, in your case the acpi seems to be it. Check out kernel.org and see if they are there yet on acpi.

Don't be too put off by it, the computer does almost all the work, with your part being to type the commands from the howto, read a few howtos and docs on it, give it a try, there's no harm done to your system other than some disk space consumed. Probably the next versions of the most popular distros will have better support for acpi, so you could just wait for them if that's to your liking.

Im thinking that the 9.2 will have that included, or at least Im hoping so.

yeah, check out the cooker at mandrake.com to see...