[Leaplist] Fedora 9 on Gateway P-7811FX "Centrino 2" notebook

[Richard F. Ostrow Jr.]

<quote who="Bryan J. Smith">
> - Intel 5100AGN WLAN
>
> Although the driver/firmware is experimental, with an
> updated Fedora 9 kernel, it does seem to load the Intel
> 2008 June 5000AGN firmware on the iwl4965 driver without
> throwing an error code.  It can then see the WLANs.
>
> It wouldn't connect to my 802.11g WLAN with WPA2 though.
>
> Ironically, it had trouble connecting to my 802.11g WLAN
> in the pre-loaded Vista, it didn't like my WPA2 setup.
> Even though it should support fall-back to 802.11b and WPA,
> a few WLAN MACs just don't.  I've seen this before on other products too.
>
> I'm going to try the open AP at my hotel tonight.  Sounds
> like Intel's got some bugs in its firmware at this point,
> even under Vista, for the 5000 series.  ;)

That's a bit distressing... I have the same wireless module in my laptop
(intel 4965). It took me quite a while to figure out how to enable it
(kernel starts with the RF_KILL switch enabled, but I managed to tie a
ACPI keyboard function to toggle that). I'll have to try a WPA2 network
and see if it still works.

> The nVidia drivers from 7/30 fully support the GeForce Go
> 8800M GTS 512MiB, including the HDMI out it seems.  Ahhh,
> 1920x1200 in a notebook, very bright'n beautiful -- although
> the 19V @ 6.32A (120W, *YIKES*!) was a shocker coming from
> my HP's already "beefy" 19V @ 4.94A (90W).

I also have a similar video card (8600 GT w/ 512). Ironically, the support
is MUCH better under linux than in windows. The latest drivers officially
available under windows are over a year old, and are utterly incapable of
running today's games. Luckily, I found a site (laptopvideo2go.com) that
hacked at the nvidia drivers to allow me to install much later versions,
which play nearly everything I've thrown at it.

Under linux, I get contrast control (via ACPI), HDMI output, and video
switching (multiple monitor support) via ACPI. My screen is not quite as
high resolution, though (1680x1050)... I traded video quality for more
powerful graphics capability (given the choices I had at the time).

> Didn't try suspend/resume yet.
>
> - Funky partitioning ...
>
> They ship 3 partitions, on odd-boundaries ...
>  10GiB "Recovery Partition" -- starts cyl/hd 0/32 (not 0/1)
>  90GiB "OS" Vista (C:) -- also on odd boundaries
>  90GiB "DATA" Vista (D:)

Ditto on that, too... only in my case, I intentionally blew it away once I
verified that I could install Windows using the key on the bottom of the
laptop and my vista disc. All the drivers are available on-line, I never
installed the bloat... and honestly, the system restore disc from my
laptop vendor was horrendous (4 hour install, all bloat *MUST* be
installed, sloppy installer (if you allow windows to reboot when it asks
the first time, you WILL have to restart the process from scratch (took
1.5 hours to reach that point))).

Given that I no longer needed the horrendous system restore that came with
the laptop, I blew away all three partitions and started from scratch.
Unfortunately, I think I left some funky geometry in there, because cfdisk
refuses to touch it complaining about the geometry, and fdisk just spouts
a warning... but I got my 10G of space back.

In my case, I've got an ASUS V1S:

Intel Core2Duo T7700
15.4" WSXGA+ (1680x1050)
Intel 4965 (abgn)
bluetooth
160GB hard drive
2G RAM
GeForce 8600 GT (512M)

I run gentoo, and every device on the laptop seems to work perfectly. I
also seem to be about the only one who has had no trouble getting it to
work with 2.6.25+ kernels... perhaps others missed the ACPI options?
(These really kill the thing when not enabled and configured properly).

-- 
Life without passion is death in disguise


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