suse 10.0 on nc6220

[gert ormel]

I'm posting this message on behalf of my, who's having serious problems with SuSE 10.0 on his HP nc6220 laptop. I persuaded him to go for a quality laptop and a quality OS, but I feel rather embarrassed by the problems he's encountering.

ACPI is not working properly:
- thermal control is flaky,
- resume from hibernation to disk doesn't
work (not thinking yet about giving
suspend to RAM a try!)

without pci=noacpi and reboot=b in grub's menu.lst the machine doesn't reboot,

wireless (IntelPro2200) isn't working,

sound doesn't work,

machine's sound button's don't work either.

As it stands at the moment, the machine can hardly be used as a functional laptop.

Any suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks,

[Alan_152]

I've personally found that redhat and fedora work a bit better on laptops. Failing that, a custom Gentoo build might do the trick. As it stands, the nc6220 is only currently certified for XP and FreeDOS (no mention of Linux is on the website at all).

You might also want to check your linux compatibility with the wireless and sound with a Ubuntu or Knoppix live CD. I've always had a world of trouble getting wireless conenctions to work if the WNIC isn't natively supported.

If you are committed to SuSE, I'd recommend that you turn of ACPI in the BIOS, or else make sure that the BIOS is completely up to date.

[gert ormel]

Hello Allen,

Thanks for your suggestions.

We've sorted out the sound problem, and the suspend to disk is now also working.

The wirless card is an Intel Pro 2915 abg for which SuSE10 pruvides a driver; the card is configurered correctly. Maybe a firewall issue.

What I find most worrying though is the temperature management: it seems to be very unpredictable. The dmesg output has various ACPI warnings. I did a recompile of the dstd table, but couldn't find compilation errors; 2 warnings only. If we would disable ACPI support in the BIOS, what effect would it have on the temp. etc. management by the OS?

I've just opened another tread on an ACPI message in the dmsg: 'looking for DSTD in initrd..not found!' I've no idea where this message comes from, what its consequences are and what to do about it.

Novell says on its website that the nc6220 is certified for Suse DeskTop 9, which isn't the same as SuSE 10 but reasonable close.

Thanks for your help,

[Alan_152]

"If we would disable ACPI support in the BIOS, what effect would it have on the temp. etc. management by the OS?"

It is kind of a crapshoot -- with ACPI turned off the fans would be running constantly, but at the same time your drives, CPU, and NIC would also be running full out constantly (no speedstep or anything like that). The kernel ACPI management would also be worth nothing, as it would have nothing to control. The biggest problem, of course, would be battery life -- you just wouldn't have very much of that.