Does anyone know if ther have been advances in getting HP notebooks to work on Linux???

I Bought a HP Pavilion N5190 notebook thinking on learning Linux latter. is a PIII 700 with a high resolution 14" screen. 10G HD. DVD, etc.

Recently found HP forum messages complaining that this "advanced machine" components did not supported Linux. I alsmost had a hearth attack because knowing I was going to be on the road I spent all my credit on it. It just did not occur to me that HP people was going to be that stupid!

Meanwhile I am buying a winlinux product that works on top of MSwindows (www.winlinux.net)
But what I realy need is a full Linux such as SUSE, REd Hat, Caldera etc. to run the open surce GIS software GRASS.

Any help on this matter will be much appreciated

If you could list some of the advanced components someone might have some insight.

I installed Redhat 7.0 on my N5190 and it worked fine. I think I chose Glidepoint for the mouse, everything seemed ok after that. I don't have it installed anymore, so I can't give much else in the way of info, but it seemed to install pretty well actually.

Have a look at the linux-laptop HP page.

yea i'm running an HP n5190 right now with slack 8 installed. i also used to have redhat on here, works just fine. except before i had to get some kinda modules and whatnot from some guy's site to get x working without framebuffer and to get the fancy ethernet working. but with xfree86 4 everythings just peachy.

I just had this same problem...
Go to the redhat-config-xfree86 gui, and go tohe advanced tab, and then choose a generic monitor that fits your hardware. I have an hp pavilion n5190 and it worked witht the "generic Laptop Display Panel 1024 x 768" I was following all of the steps pther people are recomending, and none of 'em worked.

Maybe first do:
su
init 3
redhat-config-xfree86 -v --reconfig
(that causes the config program to ignore previous settings and do its best from probes)
then when you get out of there,
init 5

--then do the cahnge I mentioned above, restarting the X server each time you mnake a change to test it out.
hope this helps, it did for me.

Now it's my turn to do the same. I just aquired a Pavilion N5190, and am thinking about Red Hat 8.x or 9. Any suggestions on which to choose?