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This is a fairly hefty laptop, more of a desktop replacement model than anything else.
Since the laptop came with WinXP Pro installed already, I decide to do a dual boot system. The 40 gig hard drive was already divided up into 2 partitions. A ~28gig windows partition, and a ~10 gig partition that had a windows restore image on it.
For the linux side I chose SuSE 9.1 FTP version. The install was pretty straight forward, I deleted the 10 gig windows partition and created a 512MB swap partition, and a ~9.5GB / partition using Reiserfs. I chose my packages and clicked install, when the system tried to format the swap partition it compalined that it could not complete the format. The reiserfs partition was formatted fine though and installation continued without incident after that.
Post Installation Setup, Grub is the default bootloader for SuSE, it handled booting to windows just fine. Yast2 launches and detects and then asks you to configure your hardware. See the table below for what worked, what didn't, and what I eventually did get working.
Yast2 asked to configure my network devices, it detected my wired and wlan perfectly. The modem was another story it detected it, but when I tried to configure it yast2 said that package smartlink-softmodem-2.96-79.i586 must be installed and tried to install it, but failed. I will try that again when the system is up and running. The wireless isn't working yet. From reading it sounds like it uses the orinoco_pci driver but the device # is off by one, so you have to patch the and recompile the module? I will post more when/if I get it working.
| Hardware | Worked | Worked with some tinkering | Not Working | Not tested |
| Wireless Network | X | |||
| Wired Network | X | |||
| Video | X | |||
| Sound | X | |||
| Touchpad | X | |||
| USB | X | |||
| DVDROM | X | |||
| CD Burner | X | |||
| Scroll Button | X | |||
| Modem | X | |||
| Laptop Specific Stuff Battery Meter etc. | X | |||
| 6 Quick Access Buttons | X |
