This document is to record my Red Hat 9 Linux experience using my VPR Matrix 185-A5 Laptop. I hope this helps anyone who has the same laptop, and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via email at: talbrech@css.edu

First, a few things about the laptop. I really like this machine, I was "stuck" on always getting IBM Thinkpads, but one day at Best Buy I found a good deal just waiting for me. It was for a VPR Matrix 185-A5. Open box, $899. I figured there was a catch and there was - It contained no battery or AC-Adapter. I made the techs at Best Buy hook up a generic AC-Adapter to make sure it worked. After talking with the manager, he informed me that if I purchased the 3 year service plan (for $199), that they could send me a battery and AC-Adapter for free. I checked out BestBuy.com, and the AC-Adapter is $49.99, and the battery was $139.99. So for the extra $10, I received a full 3-year warranty. And dealing with VPR-Matrix for warranty issues is actually a painless experience.

The Specs:
Intel Mobile Pentium-4 1.8ghz with Speedstep
512MB DDR Ram PC2100
30GB HD (4200rpm)
32MB DDR GeForce 4 420 Go Graphics
15.2" Widescreen Display (very bright, and great viewing angles)
8x8x24 CD-RW / 8x DVD Combo Drive (slot loading)
16bit/192k Digital Audio
10/100 LAN
56k Modem
802.11b WiFi
Nice keyboard and touchpad layout
1 PCMCIA Slot (I currently use for a 256MB Compact Flash Card)
2 USB 2.0
2 IEEE-1394 Firewire ports
S-Video (have yet to get it to work under WIN or Linux)
VGA Output
Parallel Port
Cool Blue LED's
CD Player Control functions are external (i.e. you can use the CD-Player when the laptop is closed, or off)
Volume Roller, Headphone Jack, Mic Jack.

I put in my Red Hat 9 disc one, and off we went. I did a basic partition scheme, nothing fancy. 1024MB "swap", 100MB "/boot", and the rest to "/". Probably way too much swap, but It doesn't bother me. I like to work with databases, while listening to music, etc.

I selected some custom packages, decided to use Gnome, and I let the install roll. When it was done, almost everything worked out of the box. Just a few hitches:

-Sound
-WiFi
-Screen Display / Resolution
-Video Drivers
-Touchpad

Sound - I have yet to get the sound working, but I will update this when I figure it out. I just installed Red Hat 2 days ago.

WiFi - Also still on my To Do List.

Screen Display / Resolution and Video Drivers. It was very annoying at first seeing my screen in 800x600 in a tiny little box on my huge display. I went to NVidia's website and downloaded the latest linux drivers. Then I edited the XF86Config file so that the driver is "nvidia" instead of "nv". Then I added the correct ModeLine for the monitor section, and restarted X. Now I get a nice nvidia splash screen, as well as my pixels go all the way out to the edge of my laptop now. However, I am still in 800x600 mode. I am still in the works to getting this fixed. Also, if I logout and quit "X", I can't actually see any text at my terminal. Still working on fixing that as well.

Touchpad - I made the mistake of installing my machine with the USB Mouse attached. Well, that means my touchpad is very funky. I will research this some more in the future.

All in All, a great laptop and not a bad Out of Box Experience. No sound is dissapointing, but then again, Red Hat took out MP3 support for XMMS anyways (you can get the update almost anywhere now), but I will be glad to have my sound back.

A few extras that I really liked. Back when my laptop was Win XP, I was using a 160GB External Firewire HD formatted as Fat32. I want to keep that as universal storage so I can use on Win and Linux machines. I plugged it in to see if it would work, and it did. Under System Tools > Hardware Browser the Device came up as sda (sda1 the extended, and sda5 the logical drive), so I opened up a terminal and simply typed (as root):

mkdir /storage
mount /dev/sda5 -t vfat /storage

And it works great. I also have a PCMCIA Compact Flash reader and a 256MB CF card. I put that in my PCMCIA slot and thought I'd give that a try. Turns out the card is Fat16, so I did something very similar for that drive.

mkdir /flash
mount /dev/hde1 -t vfat /flash

And my flash card works as well. I highly recommend this laptop to other whether they want Linux or not. But it does fly with Linux installed. I will update this as I figure new stuff out. Thanks, and again, any questions: talbrech@css.edu

T.J. Albrecht

What I still am working on / Need help with are:

1. Getting the screen to display true 1280x854 instead of a "stretched out" 800x600
2. Getting the sound to work, I've heard that I can use a trident driver, but I'm not sure where to begin to fix that, I've tried modprobe trident and with no luck.
3. Getting WiFi to work. I've tried modprobe oronico_pci and it did not work.
4. It's a long shot... But getting the VPR-Matrix button to do something, or getting the 4 media player buttons to do something, (i.e. Getting the Eject button to unmount the cd and then eject it).

I guess I'm not sure where to post it, but I have googled for a long time and found no documentation on my laptop, so if anyone has any contributing efforts to give me a hand, or has a better place for me to post this, let me know. I'll be glad to answer any questions that I can, and feel free to email me at: talbrech@css.edu

Thanks.
T.J. Albrecht

I would also like to thank Andrew Goodfellow, who wrote some documentation on the 200-A5 which is very similar to my laptop. I got most of my info and help from his site.

http://www.goodfellow.net/vprmatrixlinux/

Thanks Andrew.
T.J. Albrecht

I would like to state that instead of using my custom monitor settings that I added in XF86Config, I changed to Generic Laptop Display 1200x1024, and just made sure my default resolution was 1280x854 and now I have my resolution problem fixed. That works fine.

Still working on WiFi, Sound, and mapping my extra keys.

T.J.