Has anyone been successfull loading Linux onto a laptop? I have tried Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Caldera. I think the problem is in the video configuration. I have heard a few people saying that they had to modify a driver in order for it to work. I mean Dell is selling some laptops now with Redhat already installed. Anyone have any suggestions or other Distro that may work better. My Laptop is a Toshiba P3 600mhz with 128megs,12 gig HD, 8 meg S3 video, DVD.

I have put Red Hat and Debian on my IBM ThinkPad 600E. I didn't run into any problems at all. For those of you having difficulty this site should really help - http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-laptop/

The newest release of RedHat 7.0 is very simple to install on a laptop. I have successfully installed it on a Toshiba 4100 and a Dell Latitude. Both installs went off without a hitch.

Ooooohhh!!!

What type of Latitude do you have?
I have a Dell Latitude and am having problems with the X configuration. It is the CPt C series with a 333mhz, 128 MB ram, but anyways, if you see my other post in the General area, my GUI is huge, it stays at like 320x280 resolution. I have tried 6.0 and 6.2 but not 7.0. What type of card do you have and what settings did you use for the monitor on the laptop. I think that is where the problem lies with mine is with the Monitor settings.

Any help would be appreciated.

Drew

The Debian CD-s won't boot on my toshiba 2540 CDS. But I'm one of the lucky b******s with a T3 connection at home, so I d/l-ed the base system and saved it on my Windows partition (about 20 Mb), started the install from there and got the rest of the packages from the net. Went without glitches. But beware of the new kernel if you are using a pcmcia NIC with the pcnet32_cs driver, i haven't got network to work yet with the new kernel...

I have tried to install Mandrake 7.1 on my laptop (Asus 7200b) which worked out fine.
Exept for the sound device and my no name netdevice (Vegas ne-2000)
Besides thise "small" setbacks it worked out fine.
I would be glad if anyone could tell me where to get hold on some info on pcmcia cards (mostly netdevices) for Linux.

Regards Torp

Update:
Debian / testing also runs well on my new toy - IBM T20 :-)

rh 7.2 installed on my Dell Lat. CPi 233 just fine... video, sound, pcmcia networking... everything works fine using the default kernel and setup.

I've installed RedHat 7.* Mandrake 8*, And most recentlly Slackware, on my HP N5430, and the olny problem I had with all 3 distros was X. The video card is a CyberBladeXPm, but if you select cyberbladexp during install it loads the old drivers, at least on redhat and mandrake. I found a post about this video card that helped me out, they said to select Cyber9520 during install, and to boot up into runlevel 3, and edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and add the line "ChipSet "cyberbladeXPm" ", after the driver line of the video card and it works for all the distros ive installed. Got sound, NIC, and USB to work also. No luck on the built in modem.

Hi my name is Finegan and I've installed Slackware7,7.1,8/RH7+7.2/Mandrake8+8.1/Caldera3.1/Debian 2.2r3+4/FreeBSD4.3+4.4 on an asortment of Generic LapNote P1 133s, Texas Instruments P75s, a Toshiba SatPro 120Mhz, a newer HP 450Mhz, and a Thinkpad i1400 500mhz, and I am a linux Laptop-aholic. Whew...

Insomniac, the new kernel doesn't have to be an issue. They moved towards putting all of Hinds's PCMCIA code from being an external package and shoved it IN the kernel, with the socket driver written from the ground up by Linus: Its called yenta_socket, and its new so it doesn't work very well. My best recomendation is to compile your kernel without PCMCIA support, and then just compile the PCMCIA package separetly. That way you can take advantage of the newer apm bios stuff, the dell Inspiron 8k support if you need it, the Toshiba laptop support, but you don't have to deal with what is basically a development level PCMCIA core driver.

Torp, you've got a knockoff NE2000 clone that probably won't be that hard to fiddle with. Check out the
Pcmcia How-to. Under section 6 you might find some helpfull info for dealing with your card.

Rage... er, what exactly fails when you try to install Linux on the Toshiba? Is it an X problem? CD boot issues? Does it hang somewhere?

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks for your tips. Actually, that is what I did. If you check the date on my first post in this thread, you can see it's fairly old... Since then, I managed to get PCMCIA working on both the Toshiba AND my new IBM T20. But I still have a small problem with the network - after suspend/resume, it works for about a minute, then goes down and doesn't come up again. I have a 10 mbps LAN connection with dhcp. Any tips for this one?

Cheers,

Insomniac

Not really, I have the same problem with statics or dhcp with the one laptop I have that even supports suspend/resume... and its nice to accidently unplug the thing in suspend, open it three days later and the battery is only down to 1/4. I just re-init the connection as its not a real big deal for me.

I'll poke around and see what I come up with.

Cheers,

Finegan