I just finished a successful fresh install of Mandrake 7.2 on a PCChips' Book PC (i810-based motherboard) over the weekend. I did a custom install, low security, development system, but wound up installing all packages. I used CD-R disks from www.cheapbytes.com. One quirk under the graphical installer, which was common to both 7.1 and 7.2, is that, in the lower left corner of the screen, you can see the tops of what look like 3 buttons that run off the bottom of the screen. I've no idea what they're supposed to do, since I can't read the labels, but fortunately they didn't seem to be necessary. Overall, the process went pretty smoothly. Because the board uses an i810, you have to manually tell the kernel how much RAM you have, and be sure to tell it one MB less than the actual installed amount (so for a 128MB machine, you'd tell it 127MB). X correctly identified the i810 and appears to be using video accelleration -- I can run tuxracer -- though there are some quirks that I have to resolve. In checking how well video was working, I found that the Lemmings clone (can't remember the name at the moment and the system is at home) wanted to use a larger resolution than what was available on the desktop, so I wound up having to pan. It also failed to reset the desktop size and resolution when it exited. But it did run, which is a good start. I'm also getting some artifacts in kterm. They appear when a drop-down menu covers the text area. Since they don't show up in xterm, I'm guessing that's a KDE2 problem, not a problem in X or the video drivers. Haven't figured out yet how to get the system monitor applet to load at startup under KDE2. There were no font problems under KDE2 at 1024x768 at 16 bits. (The chipset will go higher according to the FAQs at Intel, but I'm using an LCD monitor that's happiest at 1024x768, and Netscape much prefers 16 bit color.) I haven't tried Gnome yet. Sound seems to work just fine. I didn't even have to goose it with sndconfig. The on-board modem does not appear to be working. I could bring up a minicom connection to it under 7.1, but with 7.2 I'm not getting any response. Since it uses /dev/ttyS3 (COM4), which is one of the dustier corners of the hardware world, this problem may take some investigation. Also, the Book PC doesn't have serial ports -- it's strictly a USB machine -- and I haven't yet gotten the Palm Pilot to sync correctly through USB using Palm's USB adaptor. (I get a "no such device", or somesuch, error.) I'm guessing that'll take a kernel recompile or an upgrade to the 2.4 kernel, but I haven't had time to investigate thoroughly. The installer mis-detected the HP DeskJet 810C as an 812C, but a bit of manual reconfiguration fixed that problem. I was able to print from StarOffice but haven't really pushed it yet. I was most impressed when Quicken 2000 for Windows installed and ran under 7.2's default Wine package. It was a little slow, and tended to grumble a lot (mostly in the form of "fixme" error messages), but it didn't crash and worked well enough to balance the checkbook last night. - Jeff
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