OK, here's the deal - I'm trying to find a working Linux distro with this Gateway laptop, the mt3705 Gateway.

I tried two versions of Ubuntu - Dapper and Fiesty. Fiesty didn't work out too well, couldn't see the wireless card, sound card/drivers, or ethernet port. Dapper found the wireless, magically, but sound and ethernet issues still stood.

He's a music junky, so that wouldn't fly. We tried to get sound and ethernet port working but couldn't find good answer...

So we tried Windows XP. Even though we have two legally bought keys, they are are douche bags and tell us to basically **** off and get another key. No thanks.

Now we are looking for a Linux OS that will work for the most part - I know Wireless is an issue for Linux, but I know about ndiswrapper and we have the wireless drivers.

I've heard Fedora and SuSE work, but I'm just trying to find any other OS that could, in case those two don't work out. Any help? I'm even open to FreeBSD, if it will work.

One thing, though - we need to be able to work with a mixing board.

How about you mention some hardware specs.

How about...

I don't know any?

Some of the hardware may vary such as the DVD burner but
these are the specs for my gateway MT3705 laptop anyway:

1-2 gigs RAM
Intel dual core T2060 1.6 GHz
Audio device: ATI technologies Inc SB450 HDA Audio
Ethernet: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8038 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller
Realtek RTL-8185 IEEE 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Controller
DVD dual layer burner: Samsung TS-L632D
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M
ATI IXP SB400 USB/USB2 Host Controller
ATI Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller


The kernel module for the Marvell ethernet controller is sky2.

Just as a fair warning, this model causes an endless number of headaches when trying to get it to work with Linux:

1) Apparently, the wireless card only works with ndiswrapper, but at least it'll work.
2) The sound card is, at the moment, incompatible with Linux, or at least last I tried making it work it was. I read in some random forum that they managed to get sound to work by using some kind of headphones but I don't know.
3) The DVD burner has an annoying problem that makes it unusable in Linux for more than a few minutes. There's a lot of forums out there about this one. I tried getting around this completely by converting a Gentoo Installation CD into a Gentoo Installation USB device. It works fine until I try to format an ext3 partition, at which point it slows down and pretty much freezes up. I took the DVD drive out and tried it again but nothing changed, so I don't know what's going on there.

Well, good luck with this one.