Tekchip

I ran into this problem with my old Dell Inspiron 7500. I took all cards out of pcmcia and managed to get it installed. After installing it and booting I reinserted my pcmcia network card. It was detected and installed properly and I havn't had a problem since. May be try removing all cards before doing the install?

Why exactly would you be avoiding a 2go style card? Seems to be you would want the best bang for your buck all the way around. Also what type of money are you looking to spend? Low cost laptops are becoming a trend and they are definately best bang for your buck. The Lindows pc comes with Lindows pre-installed(debian distro) and only runs $777 at sub300.com. There's also the new emachine for just barely over a grand($1149 after rebate). The emachine uses more or less desktop parts so based on what I know it should be more or less linux ready(possibly the video chipset being the only issue). And lets not forget apples offerings. The ibook comes in at only $999 and has distro's pretty much written specifically for the hardware with yellow dog and mandrake ppc. Last but not least is the Averatec laptops. Apparently from what Ive read this company has been building pc's in Japan for a very very long time and have just recently opened a US branch. They have a very attractive Athlon based laptop, the 3150H, for $919. Again most of the hardware is not unlike it's desktop brotheren so it should work well with linux. As if that isnt enough Avertec says(on the front page) that they are going to start selling they're own refurb laptops. At prices like those I honestly dont see why you would want to try to get less for your money by not wanting to go with some form of a hardware texture and lighting enabled video chip. If your really head strong about it then I'd suggest looking into finding something with an nvidia chipset. The reason for this being the historically bad support for linux that ati has shown so far. Problem is when it comes to laptops ATI more or less has dominated that market untill just the last few years. In fact they arguably still lead the market with things like the mobile radeon 9000. Hopefully some of this info gives you an idea of whats going on with laptop hardware and how linux is going to act. Unfortunately finding linux drivers that will provide 'any' sort of acceleration under linux is going to be tough unless it's nvidia.

casstyle makes a good point. Windows does cause some bad habits that are extremely hard to break. The only way your going to get into the linux thing is through a lot of reading and through keeping at it. It's really easy to run into a wall(dealing with dependencies any one?) and just give up simply because it's easier to run crying back to microsoft. Once you have the major things figure out with linux you'll find your self not only wondering why MS didn't do it this way but you'll also find your self addicted to learning linux. Now I'm not talking out my ass. I've just recently gotten to a point where I'm comfortable with linux. "I'm not just the president I'm also a customer". I still dont exactly know what I'm doing with kernel recompiles and I still run into issues with dependencies but hell if I'm not bound and determined to figure it out. I'd suggest to you first that you make sure your hardware is supported by Mandrake or Redhat. Especially your monitor and video card. I've found that the hardest thing to figure out and get properly configured seems to be X. Given the newer installers pretty much keep you covered and make it easy but it's not a bad idea to stay on top of things. Secondly make sure you know some basic linux command line commands. Most things linux are going to come down to some sort of command line usage so it's a good thing to have a knowledge of some of those commands. Just keep in mind that it is different and will require a very large amount of time to learn.

I'm not sure what version of Redhat or the Nvidia drivers your useing but 1024x768 works just fine in RH9. You sure you have the right monitor profile selected?

I'm an A+ certified technician and I'm working towards my RHCT/E. I've been doing technical work in the windows world for the past 6 or so years. Most of what I know about windows and pc hardware I learned from hands on experience. I'm also recently out of a job. I would like to find a position that I can get some more hands on experience with linux. Unfortunately sites like Monster.com and Hotjobs.com only seem to list high level positions like dbase admins and full fledged network admins. Does any one know of any web sites with job listings for low to mid-level linux positions? How was your real world experience aquired?

I prefer to think of it as covering all my bases.

Well typically I/O errors are caused by either an issue with RAM or the hard drive. Do you have some other operating system installed on the system? When was the last time you ran a full scan disk to ensure there isn't a hard drive problem? Those would be the only things I could think of. But then again my specialty isn't installs. Hopefully some one else will have a better idea of what goes on during the install.

Awesome glad to hear it! Take care!

Well that link is dead now which means it was probably an illegal copy of the software which really shouldn't be supported. First off what application are you needing to use Wine/WineX to run? If it's not a game your best bet would be to use true Wine from http://www.winehq.com. If it's a game then you really should purchase WineX from Transgaming at http://www.transgaming.com as mentioned above. Transgaming can then help you with your problem. Another posibility if your application is a game and you know it runs in OpenGL is to get the OpenGL version of original Wine. I have used that version to run Half-Life before.

Mmmmmmm....yum.

As promised here's the link with the patch software or at least a discussion of the patch software as well as a link to where to get the patch. Here's the link: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/51535 As mentioned earlier Suse8.2 must all ready have that patch applied to it. And according to other reading I've done the 2.5(unstable kernel) and 2.6(stable kernel) both have the support built into them. Word on the street is that 2.6 should be released very soon.

Looks like I was sort of on the same track. Check this little link for some good info that should help you get it straightened out. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/1/2003/02/2/33546

Just a quick observation but 'apm' at the beginning of that line most likely refers to advanced power management. Generally that's what apm stands for when dealing with the bios or even an operating system. Just a thought.

I'm an A+ certified technician and I'm working towards my RHCT/E. I've been doing technical work in the windows world for the past 6 or so years. Most of what I know about windows and pc hardware I learned from hands on experience. I'm also recently out of a job. I would like to find a position that I can get some more hands on experience with linux. Unfortunately sites like Monster.com and Hotjobs.com only seem to list high level positions like dbase admins and full fledged network admins. Does any one know of any web sites with job listings for low to mid-level linux positions? How was your real world experience aquired?

There is software, I believe a kernel patch, with support for the Sil3112 available that needs to be compiled into the 2.4x kernel. I had the link before accidently killing my last linux install so it'll take me some time to find the link for it again. I'll get back to you soon with the location to that.

After rather large amounts of research here's what I've found. Apparently as mentioned earlier in the thread the Suse 8.2 kernel is SATA ready and will work. However normal earlier kernels(Redhat 9, Mandrake9.1) 2.4.x arnt SATA ready. SATA support is available in the newer 2.5.x kernel. So basically unless your comfortable recompiling a 2.4.x kernel to support SATA on the Sil3112 then you'll need to go with Suse or wait till the next versions of Mandrake and Redhat. I personally am going to go with Suse simply because I'm impatient and havn't quite gotten comfortable with recompiling a kernel yet. Hopefully this info helps you out.

My Asus A7N8X has been rock solid for the past 6-8 months. I'm like it a lot. The Deluxe version I have has two onboard nic's, support for 8 usb 2.0 ports and every feature one could ever want out of a board. With the exception of serial ATA not being particularly mature in linux just yet it's an awesome board. Word on the street is that SATA should be fully supported by the kernel for versions 2.5 which are currently beta. Look for full SATA support in the next releases of the major distro's. I would highly recommend this platform if your not willing to wait for Opteron processors.

Awesome, congrats!

I usually do a search on google for 'linux hardware/model#. A large majority of the time my answer is found on the first few returned hits. Give it a shot.

I just picked one up for my brother this last christmas(about 6 months ago). Honestly for it's price I was reather suprised at it's performance. It doesn't perform as well as my Nvidia GF4 Ti4200 128mb. But for it's price it's pretty slick. It supports all the groovy stuff. It's only down side is that it's only DX8 compatable so it doesn't support some of the newer DX9 features. When it comes down to it though when your busy fragging baddies are you really going to notice or even tell that it's DX8 vs. DX9? No! It'll get you by for the next 3-6 months. Your probably going to find your self having to run Doom3 or Half-Life 2 at reduced resolutions to keep your frame rate decent. But at the same time it's going to run all the current games pretty well.

Or figure out how to tab and enter just like the old days! *sigh*

Seems I found your answer. It would appear according to this link the digital out is automatically muted. All you should need to do is go into the alsa mixer and unmute it. Hopefully that gets you straightened out.

Hard to tell right off the bat. Unfortunately I dont have enough time to do all the research for you. But I can point you in the right direction. First try going to the Asus web site and the support section. Do a search for linux with each one of the motherboards your interested in. If they provide linux drivers then your in buisness. If that doesn't return much or all of what your after then turn to your best friend http://www.google.com and do a search for 'linux motherboardmodelhere' this should give you tons of info on each of the boards and what does and doesnt work with linux. Asus is popular if most but not all features are fully supported then you can rest assured shortly some one will write software for it. I for example have the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard and while the Sil 3112 serial ATA is not yet fully supported the next version or two of the linux kernel will fully support it. That hasn't kept me from using linux on it. Good luck!

It's possible but with out knowing what make and model your refering to we wont have any way to tell you. My best suggestion would be to determine which make and model you want to get, or have, and do a search on http://www.google.com for 'linux yourmodel#here' and see what it says. You may also want to go to the particular distributions website that your planning to use and check they're current hardware compatability listing and see if your device is listed. Good luck with it and if you need more help let us know what model your looking at/using. Later!

Cant help you to much with out more detailed information. We need to know a model number or something. There appears to be netelligent nic's from way back in the ISA days. Some will be compatable some wont. With out know what you have we wont be able to help. I'll keep an eye open for your response with the model numbers. Later!