Thanks to everyone for the suggestions and offers of help. Last night I tried two things. First, I tried gentoo because I thought it would be cool to try to build a system from scratch. Unfortunately, gentoo's boot disk does not recognize the network adaptor (Broadcom BCM5705), and trying to manually add a driver (modprobe bcm5700, the closest match I could find) failed to load the driver. (I tried all the other network drivers I could find with the same results -- no eth0 device.) Also the boot sequence could not autoload modules for fan, thermal, button, battery and ac. (I booted with acpi turned on). So it looks like the boot kernel for gentoo isn't ready for this laptop yet. Second, I tried the SuSE boot CD. It picked a screen resolution of 800x600 rather than 1024x768, but both sound and network were enabled. I didn't look any further to see if the wireless 802.11b device was up or not. I did get the silly "battery at 0%" errors, so the battery management stuff doesn't work. More experimentation later today: I think I've decided that the acpi support in these kernels is not good enough, even in the 2.6 kernels. I'm going to try to leave acpi disabled so apm can run. I also want to try getting the sound on Mandrake to work one more time before I give up on it completely. There's at least one more thing I can attempt. I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that all of these distributions suffer from a common problem: they don't expect people to run them on laptops. -Jeff At 01:07 PM 1/15/2004, you wrote: >I need help installing Linux on a notebook computer. Is there going to be >an installfest soon? > >Background >========== >I have a new laptop from hp, the nc6000. None of the distributions I've >tried (Debian, Mandrake, Knoppix) work perfectly; each has flaws. > >Debian 3.0r1 installs but doesn't find any network adaptors (there are >two: a Broadcom 10/100/1000 NIC and a wireless 802.11a/b/g adaptor). > >Mandrake 9.2 installs and finds the Broadcom NIC, but not the wireless. >Other problems: sound is muted and the "troubleshooting" instructions >don't seem to work (aumix is not available); wireless is not configured; >power management is broken (says battery is at zero on fully-charged >batter). XFree86 doesn't come up correctly unless the display is set to >"vesa"; none of the Radeon display settings work but they should. > >Mandrake 10.0 (cooker 20031231) fixes the power messages, but power >management isn't turned on in the kernel. Sound is still broken, wireless >adaptor is still not found. Radeon (fbdev) doesn't work, but plain Radeon >does. Internal modem not configured either (probably broken in 9.2 as well >as other distributions, but have not confirmed). > >Knoppix 3.3 (booted from CD) doesn't find any network devices, but the >sound works. Power doesn't. > >Specific Needs >============== >Here is a numbered list of items where I need help. > >1. I am not tied to a particular distribution and am willing to try >another. Recommendations accepted. > >Otherwise I plan to stick with Mandrake 10.0 and get it to work. The >devices I need to get configured are: > >2. sound. ALSA snd-intel8x0 is the default module and it is loaded. The >PCI ID is 8086:24c5:103c:0890, description is "ICH4 845G/GL Chipset AC'97 >Audio Controller". The external light indicating MUTE is turned on, but >pressing buttons to raise/lower volume or unmute have no effect. I have >run a character-based mixer program (the usual troubleshooting advice say >to run aumix but that is not installed!) and verified that volumes are up >and nothing is muted except the microphone. What next? > >3. Wireless network configuration. I really need this to work and am not >sure what I need to do. The PCI ID is 168c:0013:0e11:00e5. > >4. Need to enable power management options in Kernel and rebuild. > >Any advice is greatly appreciated. > >-Jeff > > > >--- >Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. >Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). >Version: 6.0.558 / Virus Database: 350 - Release Date: 1/2/2004 > >_______________________________________________ >TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org >https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > >--- >Incoming mail is certified Virus Free. >Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). >Version: 6.0.558 / Virus Database: 350 - Release Date: 1/2/2004 -------------- next part -------------- --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.558 / Virus Database: 350 - Release Date: 1/2/2004 -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list