Hi. I've been using mandrake on laptops for a while now but every release there's always something i have to research online before i get it to work...
Case 1: My Dell Inspiron 4000. I've only been using mandrake on this guy since 9.1 came out. I went through the install and in the end i looked at the lilo config dialog and everything looked ok. So i started the laptop and i didn't get any battery readings :( so ACPI wasn't working for this laptop. I don't know if its a hardware issue?? So i uninstalled ACPI and modified the lilo config and next time the computer was turned on i had battery readings with APM. So I'm happy with that but someone new to linux would never know how to do this. I'm still downloading cooker isos so i will test to see if things have changed.... but just in case someone else has an inspiron 4000, have you guys tested? Another thing that my girlfriend complained about was how there were so many games installed but alot of them weren't playable. She wanted to play tux racer and it was just really slow. I don't know if there's just now acceleration for the detected video card or the config is messed up. The detected card was: Description: Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2x Module: Card: ATI Rage 128 Mobility That's it for the issues on this laptop. Case 2: Dell inspiron 8100 I've been using mandrake on this guy since 8.2. After 8.2 everything was ok except battery meters again. Using ACPI never did anything. I kept check my logs and it kept saying something like "trying to allocate 0 bytes..." for acpid. So i gave up on that and tried apm... i managed to get it somewhat working. I was able to press Fn+F3 and go to the BIOS screen that reads the batteries but when i hit escape to come back to X the clock was wrong. everything else on that laptop works great including the radeon 7500. My girlfriend is very new to Linux and when the laptop is connected to the powercord she is very happy with it. She likes KDE alot more than her WinXP. The only thing that bothers her is that when she takes it to work or class and its running on battery she can't tell how much time she has left. I've done research on this problem and I can't figure it out. Does anyone know what the problem is? I think this issue really needs to get cleared up because a battery meter is very important. I have a friend with the same laptop and he just gave up... sad... but I can't blame him because he's always on the run... so he swaps batteries in and out... but 9.1 that he had on there never worked. -- Adrian Rodriguez University of Southern California Computer Science http://www-scf.usc.edu/~sergior
