Hi everyone, This post is more for the information of people thinking of getting a very nice laptop and planning on putting linux on it too. Insights and comments are welcome.
I'd just like to say how RH has really done a great job of coming up with a really nice and easy to use distribution -- I just tried RH 9 just out of curiosity and now I know why people actually like it. Having put that aside, I have used Redhat and Debian on my ECS Desknote A530+, and so far mileage has really varied. First of all, the Debian installer (7 CD Debian Woody installer) works fine, except for the vga mode for the installation process. Since the A530+ uses a SiS card which has issues with the framebuffer code in the older 2.4.18 kernel, a kernel option needs to be put in to set the vga video mode to 16 bit console mode. Aside from that, the installation process is a breeze. Another issue with the Woody install would be the X driver for the SiS video controller that comes with the XFree86 server which doesn't work with the SiS 315PRO that's in the Desknote. To get X working, you'd have to make do first with a VESA driver for it just to work, then get the drivers from Tom Winischhofer's page (hope I spelled that correctly) at http://www.winischhofer.net/ and A LOT of information (technical and otherwise) on the SiS framebuffer and SiS video controller chipsets. Needless to say, too many things have to be done on the Debian side for the video to work (on Woody, or even Sid/Sarge). It isn't really much less work on the RedHat side, but then you'd go through the same agony just in case you wanted everything to work well. Some hardware also wouldn't work well in any of the distro's I've tried on the A530+ out of the box. However, there are a alot of workarounds to get some of the hardware to work even partially -- I'm referring to the winmodem and the 802.11b wifi internal USB transciever. For the USB internal wifi transciever, I've gotten the wlan-ng 0.2.1-pre16 drivers to handle the hardware, but I have yet to get a lasting connection (in AdHoc mode) for more than 10 seconds. It might be some issues with the configurations, but I've still to play with it around more. As for the winmodem, (Ali Intel 537, M5457 AC-Link modem) I have been able to get it to actually dial using the slmodem 2.9.5 driver, but alas still no connection to the internet with it. I've still got to figure out why it won't work right, or I might just wait for support from the driver writers. And the ethernet card that comes with the A530 is a Realtek based ethernet controller supported by the linux kernel. With the video working right, watching DVD's on the CDR/W Combo drive will be a pleasant experience on a very crisp 15" LCD display. I haven't actually weighed it, but it is not too heavy to be lugging around for a guy like me. Although the transmeta crusoe processor that comes with the A530+ isn't something to cheer about (clocked at 599 Mhz, with 512 MB L2 cache) at 43K, it definitely works for me. The only down side that I see with this Desknote is that it doesn't have PCMCIA support, so for people who already invested previously on PCMCIA extension cards, they'd be virtually useless with the Desknote A530+. And with the hardware that isn't readily supported by Linux out of the box, on a budget it certainly is something to consider. -- Dean Michael C. Berris http://mikhailberis.blogspot.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] +63 919 8720686 GPG 08AE6EAC
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