Today's Slashdot has a thread on "Linux notebooks from HP". When I said
that FC3T1 installs and works "perfectly" on my HP ze5000 laptop, I was
not making an overstatement. And I thought that the odyssey that I had
gone though tells an excellent story of how advanced Linux has evolved
with regard to hardware compatibility. This example also illustrates
the importance of choosing the right Linux distro.
When I purchased this HP laptop a few months ago, I was betting that it
will eventually work with Linux (or more particularly RedHat/Fedora).
As I mentioned earlier, FC1 initially wouldn't install at all. The
Honorable Alan Cox (does anyone still remember Alan?) offered several
suggestions. None worked. However, his suggestions gave me a hint to
try almost every possible startup option, including NOSUB. This finally
did the trick. But there were several other problems, including the
inability to go into power-saving mode (i.e., no ACPI), that I had to
turn off PCMCIA, and the CPU fan never stopped running.
Then FC2 came along and I had no problem installing it. ACPI also
seemed to work OK. However, when I put the laptop into battery mode, it
began crawling. Apparently, there are bugs with the PowerNow driver.
With FC3T1, everything now works like magic. When I unplug the AC
power, PowerNow immediately kicks in, but this laptop still runs better
than some of my desktops. With PowerNow working as designed, under
certain conditions, I was able to squeeze out more than 3 hours of
battery life. This is truly amazing, considering that I was using one
of the cheapest batteries. If I use a more expensive 12-cell battery I
think I might be able to squeeze out 5 hours.
After the success of FC3T1, I went back to FC2. Everything now works
like charm with my fully patched FC2.
There are two other very exciting developments. First, RealPlayer 10
for Linux came out today. I had no problem installing it in Fedora Core
1/2/3. So far, it works great.
The second development, which may not interest a lot of people here but
is of CRITICAL interest to me is the publication of the first
comprehensive macro book for OpenOffice.org:
http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/oome.htm
Or you can wait until it becomes available at Amazon.com (cheaper and
free shipping):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1930919514/qid=1091605589/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-6319084-8639941?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
While it appears that SUN is bashed by everyone in the Linux community,
by opensourcing OpenOffice and taking the lead in its development, SUN
is, IMNSHO, making one of the most significant contributions to the
Linux/OSS movement. wayne
