The Birmingham Area Linux Users
= a Dual boot with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS and Windows XP Home OEM =
- Truely a wonderful match.
Apart from the fact that the DVD+RW is burned out and the ACPI functions, and to get a successful install i had to put the laptop in the freezer for the duration of the install.
= a Dual boot with SuSE 9.3 Pro and Windows XP Home OEM =
Initially it i had a rough time running anything, even KnoppixLiveCd would give me peculiar errors and crashes.
After getting a very rough install of SlackwareLinux installed, by way of getting a partion, copying packages off onto the drive, and manually installing every package desired, i was ready to cry.
I had a gotten that install up to a X system running xfce and had extremely limited hardware compatibility.
- Attempting several other installs, all of which were rough. until i found the dumbest mistake of all. Since I had never needed to use it, I had never messed with failsafe or acpi=off options. Turns out for this laptop acpi must be off for the install. And after the computer is installed, re-enable acpi. So find the boot parameters for the distro you're installing and usually it is
noacpi
- or
acpi=off
- or
- I had not found much support for the wireless card that is in this laptop.
Ralink RT2500, most everything called for ndiswrapper and downloading the windows driver. even with this the wireless wasn't consistent. Then i read that the new 9.3 [SuSE] worked with that wireless card out of the box.
So I set off to install again. I had always been a fan of SuSE, but when had tried the 9.1 Personal install cd, i was not impressed with features or amount of software the package came with. Very limited on Compilers and 'installability'. Since SuSE was purchased by Novell i was fearful that is would become by purchase only. But then i found several sources of the 5 Disc download for 9.3 pro. and plenty of repositories for future updates and supplemental software.
- Everything worked beautifully after one gets SuSE all patched to play non-free or 'Restricted' formats (DVDs, MP3s, AACs)
first add the Packman, usr-local-bin, and guru repositories here are the links on how to do this http://www.opensuse.org/YaST_package_repository then download MPlayer and extras packages as well as xine and you should be good to go.
Here are some other usefull links: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5644 http://www.acaciaclose.co.uk/index2.html
= a later upgrade to SuSE 10.1 and still Windows XP Home OEM =