Linux support on nx8220 laptop

[Tony Austin_1]

I would like to put Linux on a nx8220 laptop using 2 * 80GB hard drives (second drive in internal Multibay slot) and an external USB cradle with a Multibay DVD-R/CD-RW.

What success am I likely to have in doing this?

Do the kernel drivers exist for the second hard drive and the external USB DVD/CD drive?

Tony

[Arunvijai_4]

Go with Fedora Core 4, it has got everything you need.

-Arun

[Gopi Sekar]

on the opensource front, go for fedora core 4 (http://fedora.redhat.com)

on the commercial front, check out SUSE distribution

Just to ensure linux can recognize your hardware without any issues download and burn knoppix CD (http://www.knoppix.net), this distribution can run out of the CD (just boot with the CD). Ensure everything works fine (video, audio, network etc) and if you are happy go with any of the above distributions for installation.

This way you don't have to go with doubtful mind of whether it will work or not.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[Tony Austin_1]

Many thanks for the helpful responses.

I went ahead and bought the nx8220 and will report back on how succcessful I am in running Linux.

Tony

[Tony Austin_1]

Mixed success. I have installed both Fedora Core 4 and Centos4. I have figured out how to install the ATI video driver to get 1680x1050 resolution but have the following problems.

1. With Centos4 the sound works but I can't get the wireless to work. I think the wireless could be a problem as there are rpm version conflicts.

2. With FC4 the wireless works (courtesy of the jim_lawrence article) but the sound doen't work.

I am going to forget the Centos4 for now and try to solve the sound problem on FC4, which is:-

As the computer boots up to runlevel 3, the "speaker mute" light on the keyboard button comes on. It won't turn off manually and I suspect that this has a lot to do with the fact that the sound test is silent.

As far as I can tell, the mute light comes on during the "Determining IP information" stage, or just possibly when starting "system logger", but I think it's the former.

It looks like some sort of resource conflict, there is an error message in /var/log/messages about registering the codecs (sorry, I don't have the exact text to hand as I dumped the install).

Anyone any ideas, please?

Tony

[Tony Austin_1]

I gave up on both CentOS4 and Fedora 4 as I could not find anything that looked like it was going to solve the problems.

I threw Mandriva on and the sound had the same problem as Fedora. So then I tried Debian (I have NEVER ben able to get a working Debian installation, don't know why); I aborted this one when the laptop started to get really HOT! I later found a note on the HP site saying that for the SuSE install you must boot the kernel with acpi=disabled or you can do serious system damage. Probably the same with Debian, Fedora and CentOS were OK.

I was just about to settle in to a 2-day install of Gentoo (then my preferred OS as it has such great documentation and community support), when I came across a copy of Ubuntu (a Debian based distro). I installed ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger and the sound worked straight-away; I had to fiddle with the networking a little to make it work and there are still some small issues with but it works,

Ubuntu is the most professionally turned out distro I have seen and has a social contract, good documentation and an active community. This is the way forward for me.