Hi Everbody,

After reading so many posts (and getting helped) about various Linux and Laptop combinations, troubles in setting up few options etc. I just thought I can share my experiece:

I have a HP Pavilion xf328 Laptop, which I bought from Sam's Club. It has AMD AthlonXP1800+ (1.5GHz) Processor, 256 MB RAM, 15" TFT, DVD/CD-RW, Internal Modem/Ethernet/Sound Card Combo. It has Win XP Home edition Preloaded and came with AOL's 3-month free account. I wanted to Install Linux/Solaris as soon as I bought it but was tempted by AOL's extensions of free offers. So I continued using it for 4-5 Months, until my laptop crashed (Not b'coz of Blaster worm, I had all the fixes in place and Norton AV was doing its job), may be it was a Virus or HDD failure. At that point I decided to get Mandrake 9.1.(I had last worked on Linux in year 2000 ...RedHat...so wanted to try another flavor) In the meantime I recovered Win XP using recovery CDs provided by HP. But it doesn't allow to create partitions. (oh yeah....I didn't considering investing in Partition Manager 8) So I was almost ready to earse it when I booted my Laptop with Mandrake 9.1 installation. But to my surprise Mandrake offered to resize the partition and I was very happy. When it asked me where to install bootloader, I thought start of root partition is a better choice than messing up with MBR, so I went ahead with that. Installation ended. When it try to reboot, it hung, and not just once, it just won't go after this message "External Cache...............". By this time I had some hope of dual booting (and continue using free AOL... ), so I re-recovered XP, and installed Mandrake 9.1, this time I installed LILO on MBR, and boom.......everything worked fine.

After that Sound didn't work, I changed it to VT82Cxxx from automatically assigned snd_<something>..and it worked fine...

Though it is not able to recognize my VT82C686 Modem...it must a winmodem...I am attempting to get it worked with help from this forum...

I am also trying to configure touchpad on Linux....

Edit#1: Though my signature reveals it...thought I must edit this post too. Well I have my touchpad configured using Synpatics driver and some good advise from ac_dispatcher. And my Modem is also working and I am able to connect to AOL using Penggy. I haven't yet upgraded my modem driver for full 56.6 Kbps functionality tough. ACPI is working, it shows battery status but unable to compute remaining time.
I will keep this post up-to-date, if I configure/install anything new.

Thanks,

abirla

Have you had any issues with XF86Config? I have a Pavilion ze4125 that I'm going to install Linux onto, but I understand there are issues in getting the screen resolution set properly.

Steve

Steve,

I didn't have any issues with X Server. All the interfaces KDE, GNOME, IceWM etc. are working fine. I didn't have to tweak any settings.

abirla

Steve,

I just realized that during Mandrake 9.1 installation I just chose right driver for my S3Savage4 Twister PrSavage Graphics card. I chose Monitor type as Flat Panel 1024x.....

May be this can help.

abirla

I have a HP Pavilion N3370, three year old laptop with Windows 98 and I had upgraded from a 6 gig drive to a 20 gig drive. So this week, I put the 6 gig back in and installed Mandrake 9.1. Win98 is safely on the 20 gig drive.

It found the screen automaticaly but offered to let me change it, hey! It is perfect. Sound worked fine, USB port CD/RW drive shows up and reads CD, I haven't tried to burn anything yet.

To get online I installed wdial and from console I type in xppp to start the dialer. I set it up under mandrake control center. Later I made a short cut to my desktop for kppp dialer.

I didn't like the text on Mozilla so I went to Konqueror and I liked that just great but found I couldn't get on some banks or some email centers so back to Mozilla. I spent about 4 hours getting Mozilla set up and now I am ready to enjoy! I am talking to you on my new Mandrake computer. My wife says it looks just like the old computer.

Don't get me wrong, it is not easy but I am patient.

Jim

Cool! I'll give it a shot.

Steve