Per suggestion, here are details for this particular model of laptop..

Sound:
Maestro-3i ---> Currently the only drivers that work are the current OSS 
driver from 4front technologies. With this driver, all sound functions 
appear to be fine.

IRDA:
Who knows?

Video:
It has an ATI Rage Mobility AGP 2x video card built-in, but it reverts to 
a standard Mach64 chipset. Isn't this video card closer to the ATI 128 
Mobility? This needs to changed by someone, since the Xfree86 3.3.6 and 
4.0/4.0.1 drivers all see this as a Mach64, thus no GLX or DRI 
acceleration appears to be running. If it was a 128 driver (r128), I 
think it would work. All this rambling means I don't have the right 
answer, I just know the chipset isn't identified properly. It does 
function with the old Mach64 driver. This card also has dual video 
outputs (i.e. Can drive the LCD and an external monitor separately), 
which isn't supported by any driver I know of under Linux. Bummer. AGP 
support also doesn't work properly under the 2.2.16-9 kernel, tho the 
module is there. It just won't recognize it. Any help with that?

Hard drive:

comes stock with a 12 GB drive, works perfectly with optimizations.

Docking Station:
Built-in network card is identified properly as a 3c59x-compatible 
(actually, it recognizes it as a different 3Com card, but this driver is 
what's loaded). So the network interface works fine, as well as all the 
other functions, like video/audio out, etc.

Hot Swappable drives:
Will work fine when swapping the internal CD-RW drive or floppy. Mandrake 
7.1 autodetects and sets up this CD-RW module perfectly. Beware, however, 
to select "not mounted at bootup" for the floppy drive unless it's always 
connected, or it'll hang when you shutdown and the system tries to 
unmount the missing drive. This comes from the floppy controller being 
detected and thus tricked into being "supermounted", but the drive itself 
isn't accessed until the filesystems are sync'ed. It'll hang!

Memory:
With 256 MB of memory, who can complain? The AGP thing really bugs me, 
tho.


In conclusion, the laptop is a good package, but as is always the case, 
the drivers need to catch up with the hardware. I'm working on the video 
drivers, but it's pretty tricky. Any help would be appreciated!

-Jason

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