I have had nothing but trouble attempting to install Linux on a Compaq AMD Turion based laptop.

There seem to be two major problems.

1) Intermittent hangs on booting the kernel, most often right after a TSC synchronization, but hangs at other times as well.

2) Attempting to use X11 and a window gui always hangs.

There is some verbage around that indicates there may be some problem with the nVidia drivers, or need to get the 'latest'. I tried some set of patches, which did not produce any usable results.

Has anyone else been successful in getting this laptop useable.

Thanks,
John Clark.

It would be helpful to know which linux distribution you're trying to install. The distro you're trying might not have a new enough kernel for the hardware.

You can also check out Linux-on-Laptops and Tuxmobil to see if your laptop has been used.

The kernels I'm using are listed below, since it hangs in the kernel boot phase, whether it is 'x' distribution or 'y' is somewhat irrelevant, ie I would have the same problem if I had made an initrd with a busybox environment...

linux-2.6.18.3
linux-2.6.19.1
linux-2.6.20-rc4

From what I've found, the problem seems to be centered on the AMD Turion dual, APIC, and as yet undetermined reasons why things either hang, or crash.

There are other HP notebooks using the same basic CPU set, and the advice that was given was to put the following options on the linux kernel command line (using Grub...):

linux ... root=... noapic nosmp

This allows the kernel to come up, and then initialize the world, and even run X11+GUI.

However, there are still limiations because one is messing around with the APIC, and of course one has disabled the dual coreness...

I had the same issues with my HP dv6105us.
I was able to install FC6 with noapic option. I heard Sabayon works well with these laptops with similar specs (AMD 64 Turion/Nvidia) Seems to work fine for me. My only problem is headphone jack not working with the Nvidia mcp51 High Def chipset. I'm sure it will be fixed in future alsa releases.